
Class ^ P\42d=. 



OLIVER CROMWELL 



BY 



JOHN MORLEY, M.P. 



FULLY ILLUSTRATED WITH CAREFULLY AUTHEN- 
TICATED PORTRAITS IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE 
GALLERIES, AND WITH REPRODUCTIONS OF 
CONTEMPORANEOUS PRINTS IN THE BRITISH 
MUSEUM AND THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 




NEW YORK 
THE CENTURY CO. 

1900 



.ibrury Of conoi::;;;! 

j OCT 10 1900 

I bcTf^NP cop/ 



Copyright, 1899, 1900, by 
The Century Co. 



The DeVinne Press. 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Facing page 
ELIZABETH CROMWELL, DAUGHTER OF SIR THOMAS 
STEWARD OF ELY, WIFE OF ROBERT CROMWELL, 

AND MOTHER OF OLIVER CROMWELL 428 

From the original portrait at Chequers Court, by permission of Mrs. Frank- 
land-Russell- Astley. 

JOHN CLA YPOLE 430 

From the portrait at Chequers Court, by permission of Mrs. Franlcland- 

Russell-Astley. 

CARDINAL JULES MAZARIN 444 

From a carbon print by Braun, Clement & Co. of the portrait by Phillipe de 
Champaigne at ChantiUy. 

MARY CROMWELL (LADY FAUCONBERG) 454 

From the original portrait by Cornelius Janssen at Chequers Court, by per- 
mission of Mrs. Frankland-Russell- Astley. 

FRANCES CROMWELL (MRS. RICH, AFTERWARD LADY 

RUSSELL) 460 

From the original portrait by John Riley, by permission of the Rev. T. 
Cromwell Bush. 

ELIZABETH CROMWELL (MRS. CLAYPOLE) 464 

From a miniature by Crosse at Windsor Castle, by special permission of 
Her Majesty the Queen. 

OLIVER CROMWELL AT THE AGE OF FIFTY-ONE 468 



Drawn by George T. Tobin from the portrait by Sir Peter Lely in the Pitti 
Gallery, Florence. 



OLIVER CPvOMWELL 



4 THE J; 

2SOU L DIERSI 

^ Poeket Bible : fe 

*| Contaiuiiig the moftCif not all^thofc |» 
p'zces coruamed in holy Scripture, §3> 
which ioe flicv/ the qualifications of his |3> 
inner man, that is a fir Souldier to fight |3> 
^. the Lords Battels, bothbsfore he fight, ^ 

f**^ inthefig!K,ahdafir<:rthefigfit; 4o 

^ Which Scrbturesare reduced co (c- 1* 
-«& vcraJl hfads, and fitly applycd to the |.* 
Sooldiers feverall occafion?, and To may '^ 
{iipply the vant of the whole Bible*, ^i^ 
^- which a Souldier cannot conveniently §* 
^ carry about him: fp» 

•t4And may bee aMb ufefull for any ^ 

0> Chriftian to medicate upon, novia sZ 
<» this mifciablc time of VVacre. V^ 

4 ' ^ 



Imprimatur, Edtn. Calami: i* 

-^g :i ^ 

<©> Jc/IiS. This Book.of the Lav/ fluJl no: (tepaic out ^ 
05 of tliymoutli.but thou fiult meditate tlicrcia diy w^ 
-^ and night, thit thou niaift obfctvc tc doeaccor- ^ 
J^ ding to all thit is -tvrittcn thercju, for then thrji Ssj 
*g flult mikc thy way ptofpcrous, and have goo«'. i^ 
«■? fucccOc. ^ 

4 ^ •!> 

^1 Printed at Lmdon by C3. and ^;r. for §3* 

TITLE-PAGE OF THE SOLDIERS' POCKET-BIBLE, A 

COPY OF WHICH WAS CARRIED BY EVERY 

SOLDIER IN CROMWELL'S ARMY. 



OLIVER CROMWELL 



PROLOGUE 



THE figure of Cromwell has emerged from the 
floating mists of time in many varied semblances, 
from blood-stained and hypocritical usurper up to 
transcendental hero and the liberator of mankind. The 
contradictions of his career all come over again in the 
fluctuations of his fame. He put a king to death, but 
then he broke up Parliament after Parliament. He 
led the way in the violent suppression of bishops, he 
trampled on Scottish Presbytery, and set up a state 
system of his own ; yet he is the idol of voluntary con- 
gregations and the free churches. He had little com- 
prehension of that government by discussion which is 
now counted the secret of liberty. No man that ever 
lived was less of a pattern for working those constitu- 
tional charters that are the favorite guarantees of 
public rights in our century. His rule was the rule 
of the sword. Yet his name stands first, half warrior, 
half saint, in the calendar of English-speaking democ- 
racy. 

A foreign student has said that the effect that a 
written history is capable of producing is nowhere seen 
more strongly than in Clarendon's story of the Rebel- 
lion. The view of the event and of the most conspic- 



2 OLIVER CROMWELL 

uoiis actors was for many generations fixed by that 
famous work. Not always accurate in every detail, 
and hardly pretending to be impartial, yet it presented 
the great drama with a living vigor, a breadth, a grave 
ethical air, that made a profound and lasting impres- 
sion. To Clarendon Cromwell was a rebel and a 
tyrant, the creature of personal ambition, using relig- 
ion for a mask of selfish and perfidious designs. For 
several generations the lineaments of Oliver thus por- 
trayed were undisturbed in the mind of Europe. After 
the conservative of the seventeenth century came the 
greater conservative of the eighteenth. Burke, who 
died almost exactly two centuries after Cromwell was 
born, saw in him one of the great bad men of the old 
stamp, like Medici at Florence, like Petrucci at Siena, 
who exercised the power of the state by force of char- 
acter and by personal authority. Cromwell's virtues, 
says Burke, were at least some correctives of his crimes. 
His government was military and despotic, yet it was 
regular; it was rigid, yet it was no savage tyranny. 
Ambition suspended but did not wholly suppress the 
sentiment of religion and the love of an honorable 
name. Such was Burke's modification of the dark 
colors of Clarendon. As time went on, opinion slowly 
widened. By the end of the first quarter of this cen- 
tury reformers like Godwin, though they could not 
forgive Cromwell's violence and what they thought 
his apostacy from old principles and old allies, and 
though they had no sympathy with the biblical religion 
that was the mainspring of his life, yet they were in- 
clined to place him among the few excellent pioneers 
that have swayed a scepter, and they almost brought 
themselves to adopt the glowing panegyrics of Milton. 
The genius and diligence of Carlyle, aided by the 
firm and manly stroke of Macaulay, have finally 



CONTENTS 



Boo\\ ©lie 

CHAPTER 

I Early Life .... 

II The State and its Leaders 

III Puritanism and the Double Issue 

IV The Interim .... 
V The Long Parliament 

VI The Eve of the War 
VII The Five Members — the Call to Arms 

I Cromwell in the Field 
II Marston Moor 

III The Westminster Assembly and the Con- 

flict of Ideals .... 

IV The New Model 

v The Day of Naseby . 



PAGE 

9 

21 
42 
61 
71 

?5 
100 



115 
130 

144 
163 
176 



:Boo\i XTbree 

I The King a Prisoner 

II The Crisis of 1647 • . . . . -^oo 

HI The Officers as Politicians . . , . 21Q 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

IV The King's Flight 233 

V Second Civil War — Cromwell at Preston . 241 

VI Final Crisis — Cromwell's Share in it -253 

VII The Death of the King 262 



Booft ifour 



I The Commonwealth . 

II Cromwell in Ireland 

III In Scotland 

IV From Dunbar to Worcester . 

V Civil Problems and the Soldier 

VI The Breaking of the Long Parliament 

VII The Reign of the Saints 



277 
286 
300 
310 
318 

329 
342 



3Booft jftve 



I First Stage of the Protectorate 
II .A Quarrel with Parliament 

III The Military Dictatorship 

IV The Reaction 
v A Change of Tack 

VI Kingship 
VII Personal Traits 
VIII Foreign Policy . 
IX Growing Embarrassments 
X The Close . 

Index .... 



355 
372 
381 

393 

401 

415 
426 

434 
449 
459 
473 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Facing page 

JOHN BRADSHAW 268 

From Clarendon's " History of the Civil War," in the Hope collection, 
Bodleian Library, by permission of the University of Oxford. 

CHARI.es I 272 

From a carbon print by Braun, Clement & Co. of the original portrait by 
Van Dyck in the Louvre (detail). 

JAMES BUTLER, TWELFTH EARL AND FIRST DUKE OF 

ORMONDE 284 

From a pastel portrait by Sir Peter Lely in the Irish National Portrait 
Gallery, by permission of the Director. 

DAVID LESLIE, FIRST LORD NEWARK 304 

From a print in the British Museum of a portrait by Sir Peter Lely, in the 
collection of the Duke of Hamilton. 

GENERAL JOHN LAMBERT 308 

From the original portrait at Chequers Court, by permission of Mrs. 
Frankland-Russell- Astley . 

MAJOR-GENERAL CHARLES FLEETWOOD 316 

From a miniature on ivory in the collection of Sir Richard Tangye. 

GENERAL GEORGE MONK, FIRST DUKE OF ALBEMARLE 324 
From a miniature by S. Cooper at Windsor Castle, by special permission of 
Her Majesty the Queen. 

MASK OF OLIVER CROMWELL, SAID TO HAVE BEEN 

TAKEN DURING LIFE 332 

From the collection of Mrs. Frankland-Russell-Astley at Chequers Court. 

JOHN MILTON 35^ 

From the original miniature by Samuel Cooper at Montagu House, by per- 
mission of the Duke of Buccleuch. 

RICHARD CROMWELL 368 

From a miniature by J. Hoskins at Windsor Castle, by special permission 
of Her Majesty the Queen. 

HENRY CROMWELL 376 

From the portrait at Chequers Court, by permission of Mrs. Frankland- 
Russell-Astley. 

JOHN THURLOE, SECRETARY TO OLIVER CROMWELL 388 

From the portrait at Chequers Court, by permission of Mrs. Frankland- 
Russell-Astley. 

GEORGE FOX 408 

Drawn by George T. Tobin from the original portrait by Sir Peter Lely at 
Swarthmore College. 

SAMUEL DESBOROUGH 420 

From the original portrait in possession of Miss Disbrowe. 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Facing page 
GEORGE, LORD GORING 140 

From the miniature at Windsor Castle, by special permission of Her Majesty 
the Queen. 

SIR WILLIAM WALLER 164 

From a photograph by Walker & Boutall of the original portrait in the 
National Portrait Gallery. 

JAMES GRAHAM, FIFTH EARL AND FIRST MARQUIS OF 

MONTROSE. . . .'. 172 

Drawn by George T. Tobin after a portrait by Van Dyck (ascribed also to 
William Dobson), by permission of the Countess of Warwick. 

SIR JACOB ASTLEY, AFTERWARD LORD ASTLEY 180 

From a print in the British Museum. 

PRINCE RUPERT 184 

From the original portrait by Van Dyck at Hinchinbrook, by parmission of 
the Earl of Sandwich. 

JOHN PAWLET, MARQUIS OF WINCHESTER 188 

Drawn by George T. Tobin after a print in the British Museum of the por- 
trait by Peter Oliver. 

SIR EDWARD COKE 196 

From a photograph by Walker & Boutall of the portrait by C. Janssen in the 
National Portrait Gallery. 

BRIDGET CROMWELL (MRS. IRETON, AND LATER MRS. 

FLEETWOOD) 200 

From a miniature by Crosse at Windsor Castle, by special permission of Her 
Majesty the Queen. 

ALGERNON SIDNEY 204 

From the original miniature by John Hoskins, at Montagu House, by permis- 
sion of the Duke of Buccleuch. 

CORNET GEORGE JOYCE 216 

From the original portrait at Chequers Court, by permission of Mrs. Frank- 
land-Russell- Astley. 

GENERAL HENRY IRETON 228 

From the portrait by William Dobson at Hinchinbrook House, by permission 
of the Earl of Sandwich. 

SIR MARMADUKE LANGDALE, FIRST LORD LANGDALE 236 
From a print in the British Museum. 

JAMES, FIRST DUKE OF HAMILTON 244 

From the original portrait at Hamilton Place. 

ARCHIBALD CAMPBELL, FIRST MARQUIS OF ARGYLL.. 248 

From the original portrait in the collection of the Marquis of Lothian at 
Newbattle Abbey, Dalkeith. 

THE TRIAL OF CHARLES I 264 

From Clarendon's " History of the Civil War," in the British Museum. 



LIST OP ILLUSTRATIONS 

Facing page 

EDWARD HYDE, FIRST EARL OF CLARENDON 72 

From a photograph by Walker & Boutall of the portrait by Gerard Soest in 
the National Portrait Gallery. 

GEORGE DIGBY, EARL OF BRISTOL 72 

After a portrait by Van Dyck. 

LUCIUS CARY, VISCOUNT FALKLAND 72 

From the original portrait at Chequers Court, by permission of Mrs. Frank- 
land-RusseU-Astley. 

JOHN SELDEN 72 

After a portrait by Lely, engraved by Vertue. 

THOMAS WENTWORTH, EARL OF STRAFFORD 76 

From a photograph by Walker & Boutall of the copy in the National Por- 
trait Gallery of the original portrait by Van Dyck. 

THE TRUE MANER OF THE SITTING OF THE LORDS 
AND COMMONS OF BOTH HOWSES OF PARLIAMENT 
UPON THE TRYAL OF THOMAS EARLE OF STRAFFORD, 

LORD LIEUTENANT OF IRELAND, 1641 80 

From a contemporary print in the British Museum of a copperplate designed 
and engraved by Hollar. 

WILLIAM JUXON, D.C.L 88 

From a photograph by Walker & Boutall of the original portrait in the 
National Portrait Gallery. 

JAMES USSHER, D.D. (AGE 74) 88 

From a photograph by Walker & Boutall of the original portrait by Sir Peter 
Lely in the National Portrait Gallery. 

WILLIAM LENTHALL, SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF 

COMMONS 104 

From a photograph by Walker & Boutall of the original portrait in the 
National Portrait Gallery. 

RALPH, LORD HOPTON, OF STRATTON, K. B 108 

From a photograph by Walker & Boutall of the original portrait in the 
National Portrait Gallery. 

ROBERT DEVEREUX, EARL OF ESSEX 120 

From a miniature by Cooper at Windsor Castle, by special permission of 
Her Majesty the Queen. 

WILLIAM CAVENDISH, DUKE (PREVIOUSLY EARL) OF 

NEWCASTLE 128 

After the portrait by Van Dyck. 

THOMAS, THIRD LORD FAIRFAX 136 

From the miniature at Windsor Castle, by special permission of Her 
Majesty the Queen. 

FERDINAND, SECOND LORD FAIRFAX 136 

From the obverse and reverse of a medal in the British Museum. 



1 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



OLIVER CROMWELL Frontispiece. 

From the portrait by Samuel Cooper, in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, 
England. 

Facing page 

TITLE-PAGE OF THE SOLDIERS' POCKET-BIBLE, A COPY 
OF WHICH WAS CARRIED BY EVERY SOLDIER IN 

CROMWELL'S ARMY i 

From an original copy in the possession of the Rev. T. Cromwell Bush. 

ROBERT CROMWELL, FATHER OF OLIVER 12 

From the original portrait by Robert Walker at Hinchinbrook, by permission 
of the Earl of Sandwich. 

ELIZABETH CROMWELL, MOTHER OF OLIVER 12 

From the original portrait by Robert Walker at Hinchinbrook, by permission 
of the Earl of Sandwich. 

ELIZABETH, DAUGHTER OF SIR JAMES BOURCHIER, AND 

WIFE OF OLIVER CROMWELL 16 

From the portrait by Sir Peter Lely in the collection of the Rev. T. Cromwell 
Bush. 

KING CHARLES I 24 

From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl of the original portrait by Van 
Dyck at Windsor Castle. 

QUEEN HENRIETTA MARIA 32 

From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl of the original portrait by Van 
Dyck at Windsor Castle. 

WILLIAM LAUD, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY 48 

From the portrait at Hinchinbrook, by Stone, after Van Dyck, by permission 
of the Earl of Sandwich. 

SIR HARRY VANE 64 

After a portrait by Sir Peter Lely. 

JOHN HAMPDEN 64 

After an old print in the collection of the Art for Schools Association. 

JOHN PYM 64 

After a portrait by C. Janssen in the South Kensington Museum. 



3^ ^^ ; =^^^^^^l^^>>S:=2'fe 5 ^=P#i'^g^:^^^ 




NOTE 

Everybody who now writes about Cromwell must, 
apart from old authorities, begin by grateful acknow- 
ledgment of his inevitable debt to the heroic labors of 
Mr. Gardiner, our great historian of the seventeenth 
century; and hardly less to the toil and discernment 
of Mr. Firth, whose contributions to the "Dictionary 
of National Biography" show him, besides much else, 
to know the actors and the incidents of the civil wars 
with a minute intimacy commonly reserved for the 
things of the time in which a man actually lives. 

If I am asked why, then, I need add a new study of 
Oliver to the lives of him now existing from those two 
most eminent hands, my apology must be that I was 
committed to the enterprise (and I rather think that 
some chapters had already appeared) before I had any 
idea that these giants of research were to be in the 
biographic field. Finding myself more than half way 
across the stream, I had nothing for it but to persevere, 
with as stout a stroke as I could, to the other shore. 

Then there is the brilliant volume of my friend of a 
lifetime, Mr. Frederic Harrison. By him my trespass 
will, I know, be forgiven on easy terms; for the wide 



compass of his attainments as historian and critic, no 
less than his close observation of the world's affairs, 
will have long ago discovered to him that any such 
career and character as Cromwell's, like one of the 
great stock arguments of old-world drama, must still 
be capable of an almost endless range of presentment 
and interpretation. 

J. M. 



// ir > 



OLIVER CROMWELL 



PROLOGUE 3 

shaken down the Clarendonian tradition. The re- 
action has now gone far. Cromwell, we are told by 
one of the most brilliant of living political critics, was 
about the greatest human force ever directed to a 
moral purpose, and in that sense about the greatest man 
that ever trod the scene of history. Another powerful 
writer, of a different school, holds that Oliver stands 
out among the very few men in all history who, after 
overthrowing an ancient system of government, have 
proved themselves with an even greater success to be 
constructive and conservative statesmen. Then comes 
the honored historian who has devoted the labors of a 
life to this intricate and difficult period, and his verdict 
is the other way. Oliver's negative work endured, 
says Gardiner, while his constructive work vanished; 
and his attempts to substitute for military rule a better 
and surer order were no more than "a tragedy, a glor- 
ious tragedy.'' As for those impatient and impor- 
tunate deifications of Force, Strength, Violence, Will, 
which only show how easily hero-worship may glide 
into effrontery, of them I need say nothing. History, 
after all, is something besides praise and blame. To 
seek measure, eqyity, and balance is not necessarily 
the sign of a callous heart and a mean understanding. 
For the thirst after broad classifications works havoc 
with truth ; and to insist upon long series of unqualified 
clenchers in history and biography only ends in con- 
fusing questions that are separate, in distorting per- 
spective, in exaggerating proportions, and in falsify- 
ing the past for the sake of some spurious edification 
of the present. 

Of the historic sense it has been truly said that its 
rise indicates a revolution as great as any produced by 
the modern discoveries of physical science. It is not, 
for instance, easy for us who are vain of living in an 



4 OLIVER CROMWELL 

age of reason, to enter into the mind of a mystic of the 
seventeenth century. Yet by virtue of that sense even 
those who have moved furthest away in behef and 
faith from the books and the symbols that lighted the 
inmost soul of Oliver, should still be able to do jus- 
tice to his free and spacious genius, his high heart, his 
singleness of mind. On the political side it is the 
same. It may be that "a man's noblest mistake is to 
be before his time." Yet historic sense forbids us to 
judge results by motive, or real consequences by the 
ideals and intentions of the actor w^ho produced them. 
The first act of the revolutionary play cannot be 
understood until the curtain has fallen on the fifth. 
To ignore the Restoration is to misjudge the Rebellion. 
France, a century and more after, marched along a 
blood-stained road in a period that likewise extended 
not very much over twenty years, from the calling of 
the States-General, in 1789, through consulate and 
empire to Moscow and to Leipsic. Only time tells 
all. In a fine figure the sublimest of Roman poets 
paints the struggle of warrior hosts upon the plain, 
the gleam of burnished arms, the fiery wheeling of the 
horse, the charges that thunder on the ground. But 
yet, he says, there is a tranquil spot on the far-of¥ 
heights whence all the scouring legions seem as if they 
stood still, and all the glancing flash and confusion of 
battle as though it were blended in a sheet of steady 
flame.^ So history makes the shifting things seem 
fixed. Posterity sees a whole. With the states- 
man in revolutionary times it is different. Through 
decisive moments that seemed only trivial, and by 
critical turns that seemed indifferent, he explores dark 
and untried paths, groping his way through a jungle 
of vicissitude, ambush, strategem, expedient; a match 

1 Lucretius, ii. 323-332. 



PROLOGUE 5 

for Fortune in all her moods; lucky if now and again 
he catch a glimpse of the polar star. Such is the case 
of Cromwell. The effective revolution came thirty 
years later, and when it came it was no Cromwellian 
revolution; it was aristocratic and not democratic, 
secular and not religious, parliamentary and not mili- 
tary, the substitution for the old monarchy of a terri- 
torial oligarchy supreme alike in Lords and Commons. 

Nor is it true to say that the church became a mere 
shadow of its ancient form after the Restoration. For 
two centuries, besides her vast influence as a purely 
ecclesiastical organization, the church was supreme 
in the universities, — those powerful organs in English 
national life, — she was supreme in the public schools 
that fed them. The directing classes of the country 
were almost exclusively her sons. The land was 
theirs. Dissidents were tolerated; they throve and 
prospered; but they had little more share in the gov- 
ernment of the nation than if Cromwell had never 
been born. To perceive all this, to perceive that Crom- 
well did not succeed in turning aside the destinies of 
his people from the deep courses that history had pre- 
appointed for them, into the new channels which he 
fondly hoped that he was tracing with the point of his 
victorious sword, implies no blindness either to the 
gifts of a brave and steadfast man, or to the grandeur 
of some of his ideals of a good citizen and a well-gov- 
erned state. 

It is hard to deny that wherever force was useless 
Cromwell failed ; or that his example would often lead 
in what modern opinion firmly judges to be false direc- 
tions; or that it is in Milton and Bunyan rather than 
in Cromwell that we seek what was deepest, loftiest, 
and most abiding in Puritanism. We look to its 
apostles rather than its soldier. Yet Oliver's large- 



6 OLIVER CROMWELL 

ness of aim, his freedom of spirit, and the energy that 
comes of a free spirit; the presence of a burning light 
in his mind, though the Hght to our later times may 
have grown dim or gone out ; his good faith, his valor, 
his constancy, have stamped his name, in spite of some 
exasperated acts that it is pure sophistry to justify, 
upon the imagination of men over all the vast area of 
the civilized world where the English tongue prevails. 
The greatest names in history are those who, in a full 
career and amid the turbid extremities of political 
action, have yet touched closest and at most points the 
wide, ever-standing problems of the world, and the 
things in which men's interest never dies. Of this far- 
shining company Cromwell was surely one. 



BOOK ONE 



Bool^ Qnc 



CHAPTER I 



EARLY LIFE 



I WAS by birth a gentleman, living neither in any 
considerable height nor yet in obscurity." Such 
was Cromwell's account of himself. He was the de- 
scendant in the third degree of Richard Cromwell, 
whose earlier name was Richard Williams, a Welsh- 
man from Glamorganshire, nephew and one of the 
agents of Thomas Cromwell, the iron-handed servant 
of Henry VHI, the famous sledge-hammer of the 
monks. Cromwell's sister was married to Morgan 
Williams, the father of Richard, but when the greater 
name was assumed seems uncertain. In the deed of 
jointure on his marriage the future Protector is de- 
scribed as Oliver Cromwell alias Williams. Hence 
those who insist that what is called a Celtic strain is 
needed to give fire and speed to an English stock, find 
Cromwell a case in point. 

What is certain is that he was in favor with 
Thomas Cromwell and with the king after his patron's 
fall, and that Henry VHI gave him, among other 
spoils of the church, the revenues and manors belong- 
ing to the priory of Hinchinbrook and the abbey of 
Ramsey, in Huntingdonshire and the adjacent coun- 
ties. Sir Richard left a splendid fortune to an eldest 
son, whom Elizabeth made Sir Henry. This, the 
Golden Knight, so called from his profusion, was the 

9 



lo OLIVER CROMWELL 

father of Sir Oliver, a worthy of a prodigal turn like 
himself. Besides Sir Oliver, the Golden Knight had 
a younger son, Robert, and Robert in turn became the 
father of the mighty Oliver of history, who was thus 
the great-grandson of the first Richard. 

Robert Cromwell married (1591) a young widow, 
Elizabeth Lynn. Her maiden name of Stew^ard is 
only interesting because some of her stock boasted 
that if one should climb the genealogical tree high 
enough, it would be found that Elizabeth Steward and 
the royal Stewarts of Scotland had a common ancestor. 
Men are pleased when they stumble on one of Fortune's 
tricks, as if the regicide should himself turn out to 
be even from a far-off distance of the kingly line. The 
better opinion seems to be that Steward was not Stew- 
art at all, but only Norfolk Styward. 

The story of Oliver's early life is soon told. He 
was born at Huntingdon on April 25, 1599. His 
parents had ten children in all ; Oliver was the only 
son who survived infancy. Homer has a line 
that has been taken to mean that it is bad for char- 
acter to grow up an only brother among many sisters ; 
but Cromwell at least showed no default in either the 
bold and strong or the tender qualities that belong to 
manly natures. He was sent to the public school of 
the place. The master was a learned and worthy 
divine, the preacher of the word of God in the town of 
Huntingdon ; the author of some classic comedies ; of 
a proof in two treatises of the well-worn proposition 
that the Pope is Antichrist ; and of a small volume 
called "The Theater of God's Judgments," in which 
he collects from sacred and profane story examples of 
the justice of God against notorious sinners both great 
and small, but more especially against those high per- 
sons of the world whose power insolently bursts the 



EARLY LIFE ir 

barriers of mere human justice. The youth of Hunt- 
ingdon therefore drank of the pure milk of the stern 
word that bade men bind their kings in chains and 
their nobles in links of iron. 

How long Oliver remained under Dr. Beard, what 
proficiency he attained in study and how he spent his 
spare time, we do not know, and it is idle to guess. 
In 1616 (April 23), at the end of his seventeenth year, 
he went to Cambridge as a fellow-commoner of Sidney 
Sussex College. Dr. Samuel Ward, the master, was 
an excellent and conscientious man and had taken part 
in the version of the Bible so oddly associated with the 
name of King James I. He took part also in the 
famous Synod of Dort (1619), where Calvinism 
triumphed over Arminianism. His college was de- 
nounced by Archbishop Laud as one of the nurseries of 
Puritanism, and there can be no doubt in what sort of 
atmosphere Cromwell passed those years of life in 
which the marked outlines of character are unalterably 
drawn. 

After little more than a year's residence in the uni- 
versity, he lost his father (June, 1617). Whether he 
went back to college we cannot tell, nor whether there 
is good ground for the tradition that after quitting 
Cambridge he read law at Lincoln's Inn. It was the 
fashion for young gentlemen of the time, and Crom- 
well may have followed it. There is no reason to sup- 
pose that Cromwell was ever the stuff of which the 
studious are made. Some faint evidence may be 
traced of progress in mathematics ; that he knew some 
of the common tags of Greek and Roman history; that 
he was able to hold his own in surface discussion on jur- 
isprudence. In later days when he was Protector, the 
Dutch ambassador says that they carried on their con- 
versation together in Latin. But, according to Burnet, 



12 OLIVER CROMWELL 

Oliver's Latin was vicious and scanty, and of other 
foreign tongues he had none. There is a story about 
his arguing upon regicide from the principles of Mari- 
ana and Buchanan, but he may be assumed to have 
derived these principles from his own mother-wit, and 
not to have needed text-books. He had none of the 
tastes or attainments that attract us in many of those 
who either fought by his side or who fought against 
him. The spirit of the Renaissance was never 
breathed upon him. Cromwell had none of the fine 
judgment in the arts that made King Charles one of 
the most enthusiastic and judicious collectors of paint- 
ings known in his time. We cannot think of Cromwell 
as Sir John Eliot, beguiling his heavy hours in the 
Tower with Plato and Seneca ; or Hampden, ponder- 
ing Davila's new "History of the Civil Wars in 
France" ; or Milton forsaking the "quiet air of delight- 
ful studies" to play a man's part in the confusions of 
his time; or Falkland, in whom the Oxford men in 
Clarendon's immortal picture "found such an im- 
menseness of wit and such a solidity of judgment, so 
infinite a fancy bound in by a most logical ratioci- 
nation, such a vast knowledge that he was not ignorant 
in anything, yet such an excessive humility as if he had 
known nothing, that they frequently resorted and dwelt 
with him, as in a college situated in a purer air." 
Cromwell was of another type. Bacon said about Sir 
Edward Coke that he conversed with books and not 
with men, who are the best books. Of Cromwell the 
reverse is true ; for him a single volume comprehended 
all literature, and that volume was the Bible. 

More satisfactory than guesses at the extent of 
Oliver's education is a sure glimpse of his views 
upon education, to be found in his advice when the 
time came, about an eldest son of his own. "I would 



\ 



EARLY LIFE 13 

have him mind and understand business," he says. 
*'Read a little history; study the mathematics and cos- 
mography. These are good with subordination to 
the things of God. . . . These fit for public services, 
for which man is born. Take heed of an unactive, 
vain spirit. Recreate yourself with Sir Walter 
Raleigh's History ; it's a body of History, and will add 
much more to your understanding than fragments of 
story." "The tree of knowledge," Oliver exhorts 
Richard to bear in mind, "is not literal or speculative, 
but inward, transforming the mind to it." 

These brief hints of his riper days make no bad text 
for an educational treatise. Man is born for public 
service, and not to play the amateur; he should mind 
and understand business, and beware of an unactive 
spirit; the history of mankind is to be studied as a 
whole, not in isolated fragments ; true knowledge is 
not literal or speculative, but such as builds up coher- 
ent character and grows a part of it, in conscious 
harmony with the Supreme Unseen Powers. All this 
is not full nor systematic like Ascham or Bacon or 
Milton or Locke; but Oliver's hints have the root of 
the matter in them, and in this deep sense of education 
he was himself undoubtedly bred. 

His course is very obscure until we touch solid 
ground in what is usually one of the most decisive 
acts of life. In August, 1620, being his twenty-sec- 
ond year, he was married to Elizabeth Bourchier at 
the Church of St. Giles in Cripplegate, London, where, 
fifty-four years later, John Milton was buried. Her 
father was a merchant on Tower Hill, the owner of 
land at Felsted in Essex, a knight, and a connection 
of the family of Hampden. Elizabeth Cromwell 
seems to have been a simple and affectionate character, 
full of homely solicitudes, intelligent^ modest, thrifty. 



14 OLIVER CROMWELL 

and gentle, but taking no active share in the fierce 
stress of her husband's hfe. Marriage and time hide 
strange surprises ; the Httle bark floats on a summer 
bay, until a tornado suddenly sweeps it out to sea and 
washes it over angry waters to the world's end. When 
all was over, and Charles II had come back to White- 
hall, a paper reached the Council Office, and was 
docketed by the Secretary of State, "Old Mrs. Crom- 
well, Noll's wife's petition." The sorrowful woman 
was willing to swear that she had never intermeddled 
with any of those public transactions which had been 
prejudicial to his late or present Majesty, and she was 
especially sensitive of the unjust imputation of detain- 
ing jewels belonging to the king, for she knew of none 
such. But this was not for forty years. 

The stories about Oliver's wicked youth deserve not 
an instant's notice. In any case the ferocity of party 
passion was certain to invent them. There is no cor- 
roborative evidence for them. Wherever detail can 
be tested, the thing crumbles away, like the more harm- 
less nonsense about his putting a crown on his head at 
private theatricals, and having a dream that he should 
one day be King of England ; or about a congenial 
figure of the devil being represented on the tapestry 
over the door of the room in which Oliver was born. 
There is, indeed, one of his letters in which anybody 
who wishes to believe that in his college days Oliver 
drank, swore, gambled, and practised ''uncontrolled 
debaucheries," may if he chooses find what he seeks. 
"You know what my manner of life hath been," he 
writes to his cousin, the wife of Oliver St. John, in 1638. 
"Oh, I lived in darkness and hated light; I was the 
chief of sinners. This is true; I hated Godliness, yet 
God had mercy on me." 

Seriously to argue from such language as this that 



EARLY LIFE 15 

Cromwell's early life was vicious, is as monstrous as 
it would be to argue that Bunyan was a reprobate from 
the remorseful charges of "Grace Abounding." From 
other evidence we know that Cromwell did not escape, 
nor was it possible that he should, from those painful 
struggles with religious gloom that at one time or 
another confront nearly every type of mind endowed 
with spiritual faculty. They have found intense ex- 
pression in many keys from Augustine down to Cow- 
per's "Castaway." Some they leave plunged in gulfs 
of perpetual despair, while stronger natures emerge 
from the conflict with all the force that is in them puri- 
fied, exalted, fortified, illumined. Oliver was of the 
melancholic temperament, and the misery was heavy 
while it lasted. But the instinct of action was born in 
him, and when the summons came he met it with all 
the vigor of a strenuous faith and an unclouded soul. 

After his marriage Cromwell returned to his home 
at Huntingdon, and there for eleven years took care 
of the modest estate that his father had left. For the 
common tradition of Oliver as the son of a brewer 
there is nothing like a sure foundation. We may ac- 
cept or reject it with tolerable indifference. Robert 
Cromwell undoubtedly got his living out of the land, 
though it is not impossible that he may have done occa- 
sional brewing for neighbors less conveniently placed 
for running water. The elder branch of his family 
meanwhile slowly sank down in the world, and in 1627 
Hinchinbrook was sold to one of the house of Mon- 
tagu, father of the admiral who in days to come helped 
to bring back Charles II, and an uncle of that Earl of 
Manchester by whose side Oliver was drawn into 
such weighty dispute when the storms of civil war 
arose. Decline of family interest did not impair 
Oliver's personal position in this town, for in the 



i6 OLIVER CROMWELL 

beginning of 1628 he was chosen to represent Hunting- 
don in ParHament. 

This was the third Parliament of the reign, the great 
ParHament that fought and carried the Petition of 
Right, the famous enactment which recites and con- 
firms the old instruments against forced loan or tax; 
which forbids arrest or imprisonment save by due pro- 
cess of law, forbids the quartering of soldiers or sail- 
ors in men's houses against their will, and shuts out 
the tyrannous decrees called by the name of martial 
law. Here the new member, now in his twenty-ninth 
year, saw at their noble and hardy task the first gener- 
ation of the champions of the civil rights and parlia- 
mentary liberties of England. He saw the zealous 
and high-minded Sir John Eliot, the sage and intrepid 
Pym, masters of eloquence and tactical resource. He 
saw the first lawyers of the day — Coke, now nearing 
eighty, but as keen for the letter of the law now that it 
was for the people, as he had been when he took it to 
be on the side of authority; Glanvil, Selden, "the 
chief of men reputed in this land" — all conducting the 
long train of arguments legal and constitutional for 
old laws and franchises, with an erudition, an acute- 
ness, and a weight as cogent as any performances ever 
witnessed within the walls of the Commons House. 
By his side sat his cousin John Hampden, whose 
name speedily became, and has ever since remained, a 
standing symbol for civil courage and lofty love of 
country. On the same benches still sat Wentworth, 
in many respects the boldest and most powerful politi- 
cal genius then in England, now for the last time 
using his gifts of ardent eloquence on behalf of the 
popular cause. 

All the stout-hearted struggle of that memorable 
twelvemonth against tyrannical innovation in civil 




From the portrait by Sir Peter Lely in the collection of the Rev. T. Cromwell Bush. 

ELIZABETH, DAUGHTER OF SIR JAMES BOURCHIER, 
AND WIFE OF OLIVER CROMWELL. 



EARLY LIFE 17 

things and rigorous reaction in things spiritual Crom- 
well witnessed, down to the ever-memorable scene 
of English history where Holies and Valentine held 
the Speaker fast down in his chair, to assert the right 
of the House to control its own adjournment, and to 
launch Eliot's resolutions in defiance of the king. 
Cromwell's first and only speech in this Parliament 
was the production of a case in which a reactionary 
bishop had backed up a certain divine in preaching flat 
popery at St. Paul's Cross, and had forbidden a Puri- 
tan reply. The Parliament was abruptly dissolved 
(March, 1629) and for eleven years no other was 
called together. 

There is no substance in the fable, though so circum- 
stantially related, that in 1636 in company with his 
cousin Hampden, despairing of his country, he took 
his passage to America, and that the vessel was stopped 
by an order in Council. All the probabilities are 
against it, and there is no evidence for it. What is 
credible enough is Clarendon's story that five years 
later, on the day when the Great Remonstrance was 
passed, Cromwell whispered to Falkland that if it had 
been rejected he would have sold all he had the next 
morning, and never have seen England more, and he 
knew there were many other honest men of the same 
resolution. So near, the Royalist historian reflects, 
was this poor kingdom at that time to its deliverance. 

His property meanwhile had been increased by a 
further bequest of land in Huntingdon from his uncle 
Richard Cromwell. Two years after his return from 
Westminster (1631) he sold his whole Huntingdon 
property for eighteen hundred pounds, equivalent to 
between five and six thousand to-day. With this cap- 
ital in hand he rented and stocked grazing-lands at the 
east end of St. Ives, some five miles down the river, and 



1 8 OLIVER CROMWELL 

here he remained steadily doing his business and 
watching the black clouds slowly rise on the horizon 
of national affairs. Children came in due order, nine 
of them in all. He went to the parish church, "gener- 
ally with a piece of red flannel round his neck, as he 
was subject to an inflammation in his throat." He 
had his children baptized like other people, and for one 
of them he asked the vicar, a fellow of St. John's at 
Cambridge, to stand godfather. He took his part in 
the affairs of the place. At Huntingdon his keen pub- 
lic spirit and blunt speech had brought him into 
trouble. A new charter in which, among other pro- 
visions, Oliver was made a borough justice, trans- 
formed an open and popular corporation into a close 
one. Cromwell dealt faithfully with those who had 
procured the change. The mayor and aldermen com- 
plained to the Privy Council of the disgraceful and 
unseemly speeches used to them by him and another 
person, and one day a messenger from the Council 
carried the two offenders under arrest to London ( No- 
vember, 1630). There was a long hearing with many 
contradictory asseverations. We may assume that 
Cromwell made a stout defense on the merits, and he 
appears to have been discharged of blame, though he 
admitted that he had spoken in heat and passion and 
begged that his angry words might not be remembered 
against him. In 1636 he went from St. Ives to Ely, 
his old mother and unmarried sisters keeping house 
with him. This year his maternal uncle died and left 
to him the residuary interest under his will. The 
uncle had farmed the cathedral tithes of Ely, as his 
father had farmed them before him, and in this 
position Oliver had succeeded him. Ely was the home 
of Cromwell and his family until 1647. 



EARLY LIFE 19 

He did not escape the pang of bereavement : his 
eldest son, a youth of good promise, died in 1639. 
Long afterward OHver lying ill at Hampton Court 
called for his Bible, and desired an honorable and 
godly person present to read aloud to him a passage 
from Philippians : "Not that I speak in respect of 
want : for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am 
therewith to be content. I know both how to be 
abased, and I know how to abound : everywhere and in 
all things I am instructed both to be full and to be 
hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do 
all things through Christ which strengtheneth me." 
After the verses had been read, "This scripture," said 
Cromwell, then nearing his own end, "did once save my 
life when my eldest son died, which went as a dagger 
to my heart, indeed it did." It was this spirit, praised 
in Milton's words of music as his "faith and matchless 
fortitude," that bore him through the years of battle 
and contention lying predestined in the still sealed 
scroll before him. 

Cromwell's first surviving letter is evidence alike 
in topic and in language of the thoughts on which his 
heart was set. A lecturer was a man paid by private 
subscribers to preach a sermon after the official parson 
had read the service, and he was usually a Puritan. 
Cromwell presses a friend in London for aid in keeping 
up a lecturer in St. Ives ( 1635). "^he best of all good 
works, he says, is to provide for the feeding of souls. 
"Building of hospitals provides for men's bodies; to 
build material temples is judged a work of piety; but 
they that procure spiritual food, they that build up 
spiritual temples, they are the men truly charitable, 
truly pious." About the same time (1635) Oliver's 
kinsman John Hampden was consulting his other kins- 



20 OLIVER CROMWELL 

man, Oliver St. John, as to resisting the writ of ship- 
money. Laud, made Archbishop of Canterbury in 
1633, was busy in the preparation of a new prayer- 
book for the regeneration of stubborn Scotland. Went- 
worth was fighting his high-handed battle for a better 
order in Ireland. 



CHAPTER II 



THE STATE AND ITS LEADERS 



STUDENTS of the struggle between monarchy and 
Parliament in the seventeenth century have worked 
hard upon black-letter; on charter, custom, franchise, 
tradition, precedent, and prescription, on which the 
Commons defended their privileges and the king de- 
fended his prerogatives. How much the lawyers 
really founded their case on the precedents for which 
they had ransacked the wonderful collections of Sir 
Robert Cotton, or how far, on the other hand, their 
"pedantry'' was a mask for a determination that in 
their hearts rested on very different grounds, opens a 
discussion into which we need not enter here. What the 
elective element in the old original monarchy amounted 
to, and what the popular element in the ancient deliber- 
ative council amounted to; what differences in power 
and prerogative marked the office of a king when it 
was filled by Angevin, by Plantagenet, or by Tudor, 
how the control of Parliament over legislation and tax- 
ation stood under the first three Edwards and under 
the last three Henrys ; whether the popular champions 
in the seventeenth century were abandoning both the 
accustomed theory and the practice of Parliament from 
Edward I to the end of Elizabeth; whether the real 
conservative on the old lines of the constitution was 

21 



22 OLIVER CROMWELL 

not King Charles himself — all these and the kindred 
questions, profoundly interesting as they are, fill little 
space in the story of Cromwell. It was not until the 
day of the lawyers and the constitutionalists had 
passed that Cromwell's hour arrived, and "the meager, 
stale, forbidding ways of custom, law, and statute" 
vanished from men's thoughts. 

To a man of Cromwell's political mind the ciuestions 
were plain and broad, and could be solved without 
much history. If the estates of the crown no longer 
sufficed for the public service, could the king make 
the want good by taxing his subjects at his own good 
pleasure? Or was the charge to be exclusively im- 
posed by the estates of the realm? Were the estates 
of the realm to have a direct voice in naming agents 
and officers of executive power, and to exact a full 
responsibility to themselves for all acts done in the 
name of executive power? Was the freedom of the 
subject to be at the mercy of arbitrary tribunals, and 
were judges to be removable at the king's pleasure? 
What was to be done — and this came closest home of 
all — to put down cruel assumptions of authority by the 
bishops, to reform the idleness of the clergy, to provide 
godly and diligent preachers, and sternly to set back 
the rising tide of popery, of vain ceremonial devices, 
and pernicious Arminian doctrine? Such was the 
simple statement of the case as it presented itself to 
earnest and stirring men. Taxation and religion have 
ever been the two prime movers in human revolutions ; 
in the civil troubles in the seventeenth century both 
these powerful factors were combined. 

II 

In more than one important issue the king undoubt- 
edly had the black-letter upon his side, and nothing is 



THE STATE AND ITS LEADERS 23 

easier than to show that in some of the transactions, 
even before actual resort to arms, the Commons defied 
both letter and spirit. Charles was not an English- 
man by birth, training, or temper, but he showed him- 
self at the outset as much a legalist in method and 
argument as Coke, Selden, St. John, or any English- 
man among them. It was in its worst sense that he 
thus from first to last played the formalist, and if to 
be a pedant is to insist on applying a stiff theory to 
fluid fact, no man ever deserved the name better. 

Both king and Commons, however, were well aware 
that the vital questions of the future could be decided 
by no appeals to an obscure and disputable past. 
The manifest issue was whether prerogative was to 
be the basis of the government of England. Charles 
held that it had been always so, and made up his mind 
that so it should remain. He had seen the Court of 
Paris, he had lived for several months in the Court of 
Madrid, and he knew no reason why the absolutism of 
France and of Spain should not flourish at Whitehall. 
More certain than vague influences such as these, was 
the rising tide of royalism in high places in the church. 

If this was the mind of Charles, Pym and Hamp- 
den and their patriot friends were equally resolved 
that the base of government should be in the Parlia- 
ment and in the Commons branch of the Parliament. 
They claimed for Parliament a general competence in 
making laws, granting money, levying taxes, super- 
vising the application of their grants, restricting 
abuses of executive power, and holding the king's ser- 
vants answerable for what they did or failed to do. 
Beyond all this vast field of activity and power, they 
entered upon the domain of the king as head of the 
church, and England found herself plunged into the 
vortex of that religious excitement which, for a whole 
century and almost without a break, had torn the Chris- 



24 OLIVER CROMWELL 

tian world and distracted Europe with bloodshed and 
clamor that shook thrones, principalities, powers, and 
stirred the souls of men to their depths. 

This double and deep-reaching quarrel, partly re- 
ligious, partly political, Charles did not create. He 
inherited it in all its sharpness along with the royal 
crown. In nearly every country in Europe the same 
battle between monarch and assembly had been fought, 
and in nearly every case the possession of concentrated 
authority and military force, sometimes at the expense 
of the nobles, sometimes of the burghers, had left the 
monarch victorious. Queen Elizabeth of famous 
memory — "we need not be ashamed to call her so," 
said Cromwell — carried prerogative at its highest. In 
the five-and-forty years of her reign only thirteen ses- 
sions of Parliament were held, and it was not until near 
the close of her life that she heard accents of serious 
complaint. Constitutional history in Elizabeth's time 
— the momentous institution of the Church of Eng- 
land alone excepted — is a blank chapter. Yet in spite 
of the subservient language that was natural toward 
so puissant and successful a ruler as Elizabeth, signs 
were not even then wanting that, when the stress of 
national peril should be relaxed, arbitrary power 
would no longer go unquestioned. The reign of James 
was one long conflict. The struggle w^ent on for 
twenty years, and for every one of the most obnoxious 
pretensions and principles that were afterward sought 
to be established by King Charles, a precedent had 
been set by his father. 

Neither the temperament with which Charles I was 
born, nor the political climate in which he was reared, 
promised a good deliverance from so dangerous a 
situation. In the royal council-chamber, in the church, 
from the judicial bench, — these three great centers 



THE STATE AND ITS LEADERS 25 

of organized government, — in all he saw prevailing 
the same favor for arbitrary power, and from all he 
learned the same oblique lessons of practical statecraft. 
On the side of religion his subjects noted things of 
dubious omen. His mother, Anne of Denmark, 
though her iirst interests were those of taste and plea- 
sure, was probably at heart a Catholic. His grand- 
mother, Mary Queen of Scots, had been the renov^ned 
representative and champion of the Catholic party in 
the two kingdoms. From her and her mother, Mary 
of Guise, Charles had in his veins the blood of that 
potent house of Lorraine who were in church and state 
the standard-bearers of the Catholic cause in France. 
A few weeks after his accession he married (May, 
1625) the sister of the King of France and daughter 
of Henry of Navarre. His wife, a girl of fifteen at 
the time of her marriage, was a Bourbon on one side 
and a Medici on the other, an ardent Catholic, and a 
devoted servant of the Holy See. That Charles was 
ever near to a change of faith there is no reason what- 
ever to suppose. But he played with the great con- 
troversy vvhen the papal emissaries round the queen 
drew him into argument, and he was as bitterly averse 
from the Puritanic ideas, feelings, and aspirations of 
either England or Scotland, as Mary Stuart had ever 
been from the doctrines and discourses of John Knox. 
It has been said that antagonism between Charles 
and his Parliament broke out at once as a historical 
necessity. The vast question may stand over, how far 
the working of historical necessity is shaped by char- 
acter and motive in given individuals. Suppose that 
Charles had been endowed with the qualities of Oliver, 
— his strong will, his active courage, his powerful 
comprehension, above all his perception of immovable 
facts, — how might things have gone? Or suppose 



26 OLIVER CROMWELL 

Oliver the son of King James, and that he had in- 
herited such a situation as confronted Charles? In 
either case the English constitution, and the imitations 
of it all over the globe, might have been run in another 
mold. As it was, Charles had neither vision nor 
grasp. It is not enough to say that he was undone by 
his duplicity. There are unluckily far too many awk- 
ward cases in history where duplicity has come off tri- 
umphant. Charles was double, as a man of inferior 
understanding would be double who had much studied 
Bacon's essay on Simulation and Dissimulation, with- 
out digesting it or ever deeply marking its first sen- 
tence, that dissimulation is but a faint kind of policy 
or wisdom, for it asketh a strong wit and a strong 
heart to know when to tell truth and to do it ; therefore 
it is the worst sort of politicians that are the great dis- 
semblers. This pregnant truth Charles never took 
to heart. His fault — and no statesman can have a 
worse — was that he never saw things as they were. 
He had taste, imagination, logic, but he was a dreamer, 
an idealist, and a theorizer, in which there might have 
been good rather than evil if only his dreams, theories, 
and ideals had not been out of relation with the hard 
duties of a day of storm. He was gifted with a fine 
taste for pictures, and he had an unaffected passion 
for good literature. When he was a captive he 
devoted hours daily not only to Bishop Andrewes 
and the "Ecclesiastical Polity" of Hooker, but to 
Tasso, Ariosto, the ''Faerie Queene," and above all to 
Shakspere. 

He was not without the more mechanical qualities 
of a good ruler : he was attentive to business, method- 
ical, decorous, as dignified as a man can be without 
indwelling moral dignity, and a thrifty economist 
meaning well by his people. His manners, if not 



THE STATE AND ITS LEADERS 2^ 

actually ungracious, were ungenial and disobliging. 
"He was so constituted by nature," said the Venetian 
ambassador, "that he never obliges anybody either by 
w'ord or by act." In other words, he was the royal 
egotist without the mask. Of gratitude for service, 
of sympathy, of courage in friendship, he never 
showed a spark. He had one ardent and constant 
sentiment, his devotion to the queen. 

One of the glories of literature is the discourse in 
which the mightiest of French divines commemorates 
the strange vicissitudes of fortune — the glittering 
exaltation, the miseries, the daring, the fortitude, and 
the unshaken faith of the queen of Charles I. As the 
delineation of an individual it is exaggerated and 
rhetorical, but the rhetoric is splendid and profound. 
Bossuet, more than a divine, was moralist, statesman, 
philosopher, exploring with no mere abstract specu- 
lative eye the thread of continuous purpose in the his- 
tory of mankind, but using knowledge, eloquence, and 
art to mold the walls of men. His defense of estab- 
lished order has been called the great spectacle of the 
seventeenth century. It certainly was one of them, 
and all save narrow^ minds w411 care to hear how the 
spectacle in England moved this commanding genius. 

Taking a text that was ever present to him, "Be wise 
now therefore, O ye kings : be instructed, ye judges of 
the earth," Bossuet treated that chapter of history in 
which the life of Henrietta Maria was an episode, as a 
lofty drama with many morals of its own. "I am not 
a historian." he says, "to unfold the secrets of cabinets, 
or the ordering of battle-fields, or the interests of 
parties; it is for me to raise myself above man, to make 
every creature tremble under the judgments of Al- 
mighty God." Xot content with the majestic com- 
monplaces so eternally true, so inexorably apt, yet so 



28 OLIVER CROMWELL 

incredulously heard, about the nothingness of human 
pomp and earthly grandeur, he extracts special lessons 
from the calamities of the particular daughter of St. 
Louis whose lot inspired his meditations. What had 
drawn these misfortunes on the royal house in Eng- 
land? Was it inborn libertinism in English character 
that brought the Rebellion about? Nay, he cries; 
when we look at the incredible facility with which 
religion was first overthrown in that country, then 
restored, then overthrown again, by Henry VIII, by 
Edward VI, by Mary, by Elizabeth, so far from 
finding the nation rebellious, or its Parliament proud 
or factious, we are driven to reproach the English 
people with being only too submissive. For did they 
not place their very faith, their consciences, their souls, 
under the yoke of earthly kings ? The fault was with 
the kings themselves. They it was who taught the 
nations that their ancient Catholic creed was a thing 
to be lightly flung away. Subjects ceased to revere 
the maxims of religion when they saw them wantonly 
surrendered to the passions or the interests of their 
princes. Then the great orator, with a command of 
powerful stroke upon stroke that Presbyterians in their 
war with Independents might well have envied, drew a 
picture of the mad rage of the English for disputing 
of divine things without end, without rule, without 
submission, men's minds falling headlong from ruin 
to ruin. Who could arrest the catastrophe but the 
bishops of the church ? And then turning to reproach 
them as sternly as he had reproached their royal mas- 
ters, it was the bishops, he exclaimed, who had brought 
to naught the authority of their own thrones by openly 
condemning all their predecessors up to the very source 
of their consecration, up to St. Gregory the Pope and 
St. Augustine the missionary monk. By skilfully 



THE STATE AND ITS LEADERS 29 

worded contrast with these doings of apostate kings 
and prelates, he glorified the zeal of Henrietta Maria; 
boasted how many persons in England had abjured 
their errors under the influence of her almoners; and 
how the zealous shepherds of the afflicted Catholic 
flock of whom the world was not worthy, saw with 
joy the glorious symbols of their faith restored in the 
chapel of the Queen of England; and the persecuted 
church that in other days hardly dared so much as to 
sigh or weep over its past glory, now sang aloud the 
song of Zion in a strange land. 

All this effulgence of words cannot alter the fact 
that the queen was the evil genius of her husband, and 
of the nation over whom a perverse fate had appointed 
him to rule. Men ruefully observed that a French 
queen never brought happiness to England. To suffer 
women of foreign birth and alien creed to meddle with 
things of state, they reflected, had ever produced griev- 
ous desolation for our realm. Charles had a fancy to 
call her Marie rather than Henrietta, and even Puri- 
tans had superstition enough to find a bad omen in a 
woman's name that was associated with no good luck 
to England. Of the many women, good and bad, who 
have tried to take part in affairs of state from Cleo- 
patra or the Queen of Sheba downward, nobody by 
character or training was ever worse fitted than the 
wife of Charles I for such a case as that in which she 
found herself. Henry IV, her father, thought that to 
change his Huguenot faith and go to mass was an easy 
price to pay for the powerful support of Paris. Her 
mother came of the marvelous Florentine house that 
had given to Europe such masters of craft as Cosmo 
and Lorenzo, Leo X and Clement VII, and Catherine 
of the Bartholomew massacre. But the queen had 
none of the depth of these famous personages. To 



30 OLIVER CROMWELL 

her, alike as Catholic and as queen seated on a shaking 
throne, the choice between bishop and presbyter within 
a Protestant communion was matter for contemptuous 
indifference. She understood neither her husband's 
scruples, nor the motives of his rebellious adversaries. 
The sanctity of law and immemorial custom, rights of 
taxation, Parliamentary privilege. Magna Charta, 
habeas corpus, and all the other symbols of our civil 
freedom, were empty words without meaning to her 
petulent and untrained mind. In Paris by the side of 
the great ladies whose lives were passed in seditious 
intrigues against Richelieu or Mazarin, Henrietta 
Maria would have been in her native element. She 
would have delighted in all the intricacies of the web 
of fine-spun conspiracy in which Maria de' Medici, her 
mother, and Anne of Austria, her sister-in-law, and 
Mme. de Chevreuse, her close friend and comrade, first 
one and then the other spent their restless days. Hab- 
its and qualities that were mischievous enough even 
in the galleries of the Louvre, in the atmosphere of 
Westminster and Whitehall were laden with immedi- 
ate disaster. In intrepidity and fortitude she was a 
true daughter of Henry of Navarre. Her energy was 
unsparing, and her courage. Nine times she crossed 
the seas in storm and tempest. When her waiting- 
women were trembling and weeping, she assured them, 
with an air of natural serenity that seemed of itself to 
bring back calm, that no queen was ever drowned. 

D'Ewes has left a picture of the queen as he saw her 
at dinner at Whitehall, long after her marriage : "I 
perceived her to be a most absolute delicate lady, after 
I had exactly surveyed all the features of her face, 
much enlivened by her radiant and sparkling black 
eyes. Besides, her deportment among her women was 
so sweet and humble, and her speech and looks to her 
other servants so mild and gracious, as I could not 



THE STATE AND ITS LEADERS 31 

abstain from divers deep- fetched sighs, to consider that 
she wanted the knowledge of the true rehgion." "The 
queen," says Burnet, "was a woman of great vivacity 
in conversation, and loved all her life long to be in in- 
trigues of all sorts, but was not so secret in them as 
such times and affairs required. She was a woman of 
no manner of judgment; she was bad at contrivance, 
and much worse in execution ; but by the liveliness of 
her discourse she made always a great impression on 
the king." 



Ill 



Just as the historic school has come to an end that 
despatched Oliver Cromwell as a hypocrite, so we are 
escaping from the other school that dismissed Charles 
as a tyrant. Laud as a driveller and a bigot, and Went- 
worth as an apostate. That Wentworth passed over 
from the popular to the royalist side, and that by the 
same act he improved his fortunes and exalted his 
influence is true. But there is no good reason to con- 
demn him of shifting the foundation of his view^s of 
national policy. He was never a Puritan, and never a 
partizan of the supremacy of Parliament. By tem- 
perament and conviction he was a firm believer in or- 
ganized authority; though he began in opposition, his 
instincts all carried him toward the side of govern- 
ment; and if he came round to the opinion that a single 
person, and not the House of Commons, was the vital 
organ of national authority, this was an opinion that 
Cromwell himself in some of the days to come was 
destined apparently to share and to exemplify. Went- 
worth's ideal was centered in a strong state, exerting 
power for the common good ; and the mainspring of 
a strong state must be a monarch, not Parliament. It 
was the idea of the time that governing initiative must 



32 OLIVER CROMWELL 

come from the throne, with or without a check in the 
people. Happily for us, men of deeper insight than 
Wentworth perceived that the assertion of the popular 
check was at this deciding moment in English history- 
more important than to strengthen executive power in 
the hands of the king. Wentworth, with all the bias 
of a man born for government and action, may easily 
have come to think otherwise. That he associated the 
elevation of his own personality with the triumph of 
what he took for the right cause, is a weakness, if 
weakness it be, that he shares with some of the most 
upright reformers that have ever lived. It is a chaste 
ambition if rightly placed, he said at his trial, to have 
as much power as may be, that there may be power to 
do the more good in the place where a man lives. The 
actual possession of power stimulated this natural 
passion for high principles of government. His judg- 
ment was clear, as his wit and fancy were quick. He 
was devoted to friends, never weary of taking pains 
for them, thinking nothing too dear for them. If he 
was extremely choleric and impatient, yet it was in a 
large and imperious way. He had energy, baldness, 
unsparing industry and attention, long-sighted conti- 
nuity of thought and plan, lofty flight, and as true a 
concern for order and the public service as Pym or 
Oliver or any of them. 

One short scene may suffice to bring him in act and 
life before us. The convention of the Irish clergy met 
to discuss the question of bringing their canons into 
conformity with those of the English Church. Went- 
worth writes from Dublin to Laud (1634) : 

The popish party growing extreme perverse in the Com- 
mons House, and the parliament thereby in great danger to 
have been lost in a storm, had so taken up my thoughts and 
endeavours, that for five or six days it was not almost possible 




From the original portrait by Van Dyck at Windsor Castle. 
QUEEN HENRIETTA MARIA. 



THE STATE AND ITS LEADERS 33 

for me to take an account how business went amongst them 
of the clergy. „ , . At length I got a little time, and that most 
happily, to inform myself of the state of those papers, and 
found (that they had done divers things of great inconvenience 
without consultation with their bishops). I instantly sent for 
Dean Andrews, that reverend clerk who sat forsooth in the 
chair of this committee, requiring him to bring along the afore- 
said book of canons. . . . When I came to open the book 
and run over their deliberandtans in the margin, I confess I 
was not so much moved since I came into Ireland. I told 
him, certainly not a dean of Limerick, but Ananias had sat in 
the chair of that committee ; however sure I was Ananias had 
been there in spirit, if not in body, with all the fraternities and 
conventicles of Amsterdam ; that I was ashamed and scan- 
dalised with it above measure. I therefore said he should 
leave the book with me, and that I did command him that he 
should report nothing to the House until he heard again from 
me. Being thus nettled, I gave present directions for a meet- 
ing, and warned the primate (certain bishops, etc.) to be with 
me the next morning. Then I publicly told them how unlike 
clergymen, that owed canonical obedience to their superiors, 
they had proceeded in their committee ; how unheard of a 
part it was for a few petty clerks to presume to make articles 
of faith. . . . But those heady and arrogant courses, they must 
know, I was not to endure ; but if they were disposed to be 
frantic in this dead and cold season of the year, would I suffer 
them to be heard either in convocation or in their pulpits. 
(Then he gave them five specific orders.) This meeting then 
broke off; there were some hot spirits, sons of thunder, 
amongst them, who moved that they should petition me for a 
free synod. But, in fine, they could not agree among them- 
selves who should put the bell about the cat's neck, and so 
this likewise vanished. 

All this marks precisely the type of man required to 
deal with ecclesiastics and rapacious nobles alike. The 

3 



34 OLIVER CROMWELL 

English colonist and his ecclesiastical confederate and 
ally were the enemy, and nobody has ever seen this so 
effectually as Strafford saw it. Bishops were said to 
be displaced with no more ceremony than excisemen. 
The common impression of Wentworth is shown in an 
anecdote about Williams, afterward Archbishop of 
York. When the court tried to pacify Williams with 
the promise of a good bishopric in Ireland, he replied 
that he had held out for seven years against his ene- 
mies in England, but if they sent him to Ireland he 
would fall into the hands of a man who within seven 
months would find out some old statute or other to cut 
off his head. 

The pretty obvious parallel has often been suggested 
between Strafford and Richelieu ; but it is no more 
than superficial. There is no proportion between the 
vast combinations, the immense designs, the remorse- 
less rigors, and the majestic success with which the 
great cardinal built up royal power in France and sub- 
jugated reactionary forces in Europe, and the petty 
scale of Wentworth's eight years of rule in Ireland. 
To frighten Dean Andrews or Lord Mountnorris out 
of their wits was a very different business from bring- 
ing Montmorencys, Chalais, Marillacs, Cinq-Mars, to 
the scaffold. It is true that the general aim was not 
very different. Richelieu said to the king : "I prom- 
ised your Majesty to employ all my industry and all 
the authority that he might be pleased to give me to 
ruin the Huguenot party, to beat down the pride of the 
great, to reduce all subjects to their duty, and to raise 
up his name among other nations to the height at 
which it ought to be." Strafford would have said much 
the same. He, too, aspired to make his country a lead- 
ing force in the counsels of Europe, as Elizabeth had 
done, and by Elizabeth's patient and thrifty policy. 



THE STATE AND ITS LEADERS 35 

Unlike his master of flighty and confused brain he per- 
ceived the need of system and a sure foundation. 
Strafford's success would have meant the transforma- 
tion of the state within the three kingdoms, not into 
the monarchy of the Restoration of 1660 or of the 
Revolution of 1688, but at best into something like the 
qualified absolutism of modern Prussia. 

As time went on. and things grew hotter, his ardent 
and haughty genius drew him into more energetic 
antagonism to the popular claim and its champions. 
In his bold and imposing personality they recognized 
that all those sinister ideas, methods, and aims which 
it was the business of their lives to overthrow, were 
gathered up. The precise date is not easily fixed at 
which Wentworth gained a declared ascendancy in the 
royal counsels, if ascendancy be the right word for a 
chief position in that unstable chamber. In 1632 he 
was made lord-deputy in Ireland, he reached Dublin 
Castle in the following year, and for seven years he 
devoted himself exclusively to Irish administration. 
He does not seem to have been consulted upon general 
affairs before 1637, and it was later than this when 
Charles began to lean upon him. It was not until 
1640 that he could prevail upon the king to augment 
his political authority by making him lord-lieutenant 
and Earl of Strafford. 

If Strafford was a bad counselor for the times, and 
the queen a worse, Laud, who filled the critical station 
of Archbishop of Canterbury, was perhaps the worst 
counselor of the three. Still let us save ourselves 
from the extravagances of some modern history. 
"His memory," writes one, "is still loathed as the 
meanest, the most cruel, and the most narrow-minded 
man who ever sat on the episcopal bench" (Buckle). 
"We entertain more unmitigated contempt for him," 



S6 OLIVER CROMWELL 

says another, "than for any character in history" 
(Macaulay). It is pretty safe to be sure that these 
slashing superlatives are never true. Laud was no 
more the simpleton and the bigot of Macaulay, than he 
w^as the saint to whom in our day Anglican high-fliers 
dedicate painted windows, or who describe him as New- 
man did, as being "cast in a mold of proportions that 
are much above our own, and of a stature akin to the 
elder days of the church." Burnet, who was no 
Laudian, says that he "was a learned, a sincere and 
zealous man, regular in his own life, and humble in his 
private deportment; but he was a hot, indiscreet man, 
eagerly pursuing some matters that were either very 
inconsiderable or mischievous, such as setting the com- 
munion-table by the east wall of churches, bowing 
to it and calling it the altar, the breaking of lectures, 
the encouraging of sports on the Lord's day ; . . . 
and yet all the zeal and heat of that time was laid out 
on these." The agent of the Vatican described him as 
timid, ambitious, inconstant, and therefore ill equipped 
for great enterprises. Whitelocke tells us that his 
father was anciently and thoroughly acquainted with 
Laud, and used to say of him that he was "too full of 
fire, though a just and good man ; and that his want of 
experience in state matters, and his too much zeal for 
the church, and heat if he proceeded in the way he was 
then in, would set this nation on fire." 

It was indeed Laud who did most to kmdle the blaze. 
He was harder than anybody else both in the Star 
Chamber and the High Commission. He had a rest- 
less mind, a sharp tongue, and a hot temper; he took 
no trouble to persuade, and he leaned wholly on the 
law of the church and the necessity of enforcing obedi- 
ence to it. He had all the harshness that is so com- 
mon in a man of ardent convictions, who happens not 



THE STATE AND ITS LEADERS n 

to have intellectual power enough to defend them. 
But he was no harder of heart than most of either his 
victims or his judges. Prynne was more malicious, vin- 
dictive, and sanguinary than Laud ; and a Scottish 
presbyter could be as arrogant and unrelenting as the 
English primate. Much of Laud's energy was that of 
good stewardsliip. The reader who laughs at his 
injunction that divines should preach in gowns and not 
in cloaks, must at least applaud when in the same docu- 
ment avaricious bishops are warned not to dilapidate 
the patrimony of their successors by making long 
leases, or taking heavy fines on renewal, or cutting 
down the timber. This was one side of that love of 
external order, uniformity, and decorum, which, when 
applied to rites and ceremonies, church furniture, 
church apparel, drove English Puritanism frantic. 
"It is called superstition nowadays,"' Laud complained, 
"for any man to come with more reverence into a 
church, than a tinker and his dog into an ale-house." 

That he had any leaning toward the Pope is cer- 
tainly untrue ; and his eagerness to establish a branch 
of the Church of England in all the courts of Christen- 
dom, and even in the cities of the Grand Turk, points 
rather to an exalted dream that the Church of Eng- 
land might one day spread itself as far abroad as the 
Church of Rome. Short of this, he probably aspired 
to found a patriarchate of the three kingdoms, with 
Canterbury as the metropolitan center. He thought 
the Puritans narrow, and the Pope's men no better. 
Churchmen in all ages are divided into those on the one 
hand who think most of institutions, and those on the 
other who think most of the truths on which the insti- 
tutions rest, and of the spirit that gives them life. 
Laud was markedly of the first of these two types, and 
even of that doctrinal zeal that passed for spiritual 



38 OLIVER CROMWELL 

unction in those hot times he had Httle. Yet it is 
worth remembering that it was his influence that over- 
came the reluctance of the pious and devoted George 
Herbert to take orders. This can hardly have been 
the influence of a mean and cruel bigot. Jeremy Tay- 
lor, whose "Liberty of Prophesying" is one of the 
landmarks in the history of toleration, was the client 
and disciple of Laud. His personal kindness to Chill- 
ingworth and to John Hales has been taken as a proof 
of his tolerance of latitudinarianism, and some pas- 
sages in his own works are construed as favoring lib- 
eral theology. That liberal theology would have quickly 
progressed within the church under Laud's rule, so 
long as outer uniformity was preserved, is probably 
true, and an important truth in judging the events of 
his epoch. At the same time Laud was as hostile as 
most contemporary Puritans to doubts and curious 
search, just as he shared with his Presbyterian enemies 
their hatred of any toleration for creed or church out- 
side of the established fold. He was fond of learning 
and gave it munificent support, and he had the merit of 
doing what he could to found his cause upon reason. 
But men cannot throw off the spirit of their station, 
and after all his sheet-anchor was authority. His 
ideal has been described as a national church, governed 
by an aristocracy of bishops, invested with certain 
powers by divine right, and closely united with the 
monarchy. Whether his object was primarily doc- 
trinal, to cast out the Calvinistic spirit, or the restor- 
ation of church ceremonial, it would be hard to decide; 
but we may be sure that if he actively hated heresies 
about justification or predestination, it was rather as 
breaches of order than as either errors of intellect or 
corruptions of soul. 

"He had few vulgar or private vices," says a con- 



THE STATE AND ITS LEADERS 39 

temporary, "and, in a word, was not so much to be 
called bad as unfit for the state of England." He was 
unfit for the state of England, because, instead of meet- 
ing a deep spiritual movement with a missionary in- 
spiration of his own, he sought no saintlier weapons 
than oppressive statutes and persecuting law-courts. 
It may be at least partially true that the nation had 
been a consenting party to the Tudor despotism, from 
which both statute and court had come down. Per- 
secution has often won in human history; often has a 
violent hand dashed out the lamp of truth. But the 
Puritan exodus to New England was a signal, and no 
statesman ought to have misread it, that new forces 
.were arising and would require far sharper persecution 
to crush them than the temper of the nation was likely 
to endure. 

In the early stages of the struggle between Parlia- 
ment and king, the only leader on the popular side on 
a level in position with Strafford and Laud was John 
Pym, in many ways the foremost of all our Parlia- 
mentary worthies. A gentleman of good family and 
bred at Oxford, he had entered the House of Com- 
mons eleven years before the accession of Charles. 
He made his mark early as one who understood the 
public finances, and. what was even more to the point, 
as a determined enemy of popery. From the first, in 
the words of Clarendon, he had drawn attention for 
being concerned and passionate in the jealousies of re- 
ligion, and much troubled with the countenance gi\'en 
to the opinions of Arminius. He was a Puritan in the 
widest sense of that word of many shades. That is 
to say, in the expression of one who came later, "he 
thought it part of a man's religion to see that his coun- 
try be well governed," and by good government he 
meant the rule of righteousness both in civil and in 



40 OLIVER CROMWELL 

sacred things. He wished the monarchy to stand, and 
the Church of England to stand; nor was any man 
better grounded in the maxims and precedents that 
had brought each of those exahed institutions to be 
what it was. 

Besides massive breadth of judgment, Pym had one 
of those himinous and discerning minds that have the 
rare secret in times of high contention of singhng out 
the central issues and choosing the best battle-ground. 
Early he perceived and understood the common im- 
pulse that was uniting throne and altar against both 
ancient rights and the social needs of a new epoch. He 
was no revolutionist either by temper or principle. A 
single passage from one of his speeches is enough to 
show us the spirit of his statesmanship, and it is well 
worth quoting. "The best form of government," he 
said, "is that which doth actuate and dispose every part 
and member of a state to the common good; for as 
those parts give strength and ornament to the whole, 
so they receive from it again strength and protection 
in their several stations and degrees. H, instead of 
concord and interchange of support, one part seeks to 
uphold an old form of government, and the other part 
introduce a new, they will miserably consume one an- 
other. Histories are full of the calamities of entire 
estates and nations in such cases. It is, nevertheless, 
equally true that time must needs bring about some 
alterations. . . . Therefore have those common- 
wealths been ever the most durable and perpetual 
which have often reformed and recomposed themselves 
according to their first institution and ordinance. By 
this means they repair the breaches, and counterwork 
the ordinary and natural effects of time." 

This was the English temper at its best. Sur- 
rounded by men who were often apt to take narrow 



THE STATE AND ITS LEADERS 41 

views, Pym, if ever English statesman did, took broad 
ones ; and to impose broad views upon the narrow is 
one of the things that a party leader exists for. He 
had the double gift, so rare even among leaders in 
popular assemblies, of being at once practical and ele- 
vated ; a master of tactics and organizing arts, and yet 
the inspirer of solid and lofty principles. How can 
we measure the perversity of a king and counselors 
who forced into opposition a man so imbued with the 
deep instinct of government, so whole-hearted, so keen 
of sight, so skilful in resource as Pym. 



m 



CHAPTER III 



PURITANISM AND THE DOUBLE ISSUE 



NIVERSAL history has been truly said to make 
a large part of every national history. The lamp 
that lights the path of a single nation, receives its 
kindling flame from a central line of beacon-fires that 
mark the onward journey of the race. The English 
have never been less insular in thought and interest 
than they were in the seventeenth century. About the 
time when Calvin died (1564) it seemed as if the 
spiritual empire of Rome would be confined to the two 
peninsulas of Italy and Spain. North of the Alps 
and north of the Pyrenees the Reformation appeared to 
be steadily sweeping all before it. Then the floods 
turned back; the power of the papacy revived, its 
moral ascendancy was restored ; the Counter-Reforma- 
tion or the Catholic reaction by the time when Crom- 
well and Charles came into the world, had achieved 
startling triumphs. The indomitable activity of the 
Jesuits had converted opinion, and the arm of flesh 
lent its aid in the holy task of reconquering Christen- 
dom. What the arm of flesh meant the English could 
see with the visual eye. They never forgot Mary 
Tudor and the Protestant martyrs. In 1567 Alva set 
up his court of blood in the Netherlands. In 1572 the 

42 



PURITANISM AND THE STATE 43 

pious work in France began with the massacre of St. 
Bartholomew. In 1588 the Armada appeared in the 
British Channel for the subjugation and conversion of 
England. In 1605 Guy Fawkes and his powder-bar- 
rels were found in the vault under the House of Lords. 
These were the things that explain that endless angry 
refrain against popery, that rings through our seven- 
teenth century with a dolorous monotony at which 
modern indifference may smile and reason and toler- 
ance may groan. 

Britain and Holland were the two Protestant strong- 
holds, and it was noticed that the Catholics in Holland 
were daily multiplying into an element of exceeding 
strength, while in England, though the Catholics had 
undoubtedly fallen to something very considerably less 
than the third of the whole population, which was their 
proportion in the time of Elizabeth, still they began 
under James and Charles to increase again. People 
counted with horror in Charles's day some ninety 
Catholics in places of trust about the court, and over 
one hundred and ninety of them enjoying property and 
position in the English counties. What filled England 
with dismay filled the pertinacious Pope Urban VIII 
with the hope of recovering here some of the ground 
that he had lost elsewhere, and he sent over first Pan- 
zani, then Cuneo, then Rossetti, to work for the recon- 
quest to Catholicism of the nation whom another pope 
a thousand years before had first brought within the 
Christian fold. The presence of the Roman agents at 
Whitehall only made English Protestantism more vio- 
lently restive. A furious struggle was raging on the 
continent of Europe. The Thirty Years' War (1618- 
1648) was not in all its many phases a contest of Pro- 
testant and Catholic, but that tremendous issue was 
never remote or extinct ; and even apart from the im- 



44 OLIVER CROMWELL 

portant circumstance that the Elector Palatine had es- 
poused the daughter of James I, its fluctuations kept 
up a strong and constant under-current of feeling and 
attention in England. 



II 



"The greatest liberty of our kingdom is religion," said 
Pym, and Cromwell's place in history is due to the 
breadth with which he underwent this mastering im- 
pression of the time, and associated in his own person 
the double conditions, political and moral, of national 
advance. Though the conditions were twofold, relig- 
ion strikes the key-note. Like other movements, the 
course of the Reformation followed the inborn differ- 
ences of human temperament, and in due time divided 
itself into a right wing and a left. Passion and logic, 
the two great working elements of revolutionary 
change, often over-hot the one, and narrow and sophis- 
ticated the other, carry men along at different rates 
according to their natural composition, and drop them 
at different stages. Most go to fierce extremes; few 
hold on in the "quiet flow of truths that soften hatred, 
temper strife" ; and for these chosen spirits there is no 
place in the hour of conflagration. In England the 
left wing of Protestantism was Puritanism, and Puri- 
tanism in its turn threw out an extreme left with a 
hundred branches of its own. The history of Crom- 
well almost exactly covers this development from the 
steady-going doctrinal Puritanism that he found pre- 
vailing when he first emerged upon the public scene, 
down to the faiths of the hundred and seventy enthusi- 
astic sects whom he still left preaching and praying 
and warring behind him when his day was over. 
In this long process, so extensive and so compli- 



PURITANISM AND THE STATE 45 

cated, — an inter-related evolution of doctrine, disci- 
pline, manners, ritual, church polity, all closely linked 
with corresponding changes in affairs of civil govern- 
ment, — it is not easy to select a leadmg clue through 
the labyrinth. It is not easy to disentangle the double 
plot in church and state, nor to fix in a single formula 
that wide twofold impulse, religious and political, 
under which Cromwell's age and Cromwell the man 
of his age, marched toward their own ideals of purified 
life and higher citizenship. It is enough here to say in 
a word that in the Cromwellian period, when the fer- 
ment at once so subtle and so tumultuous had begun 
to clear, it was found that, though by no direct and far- 
sighted counsel of Cromwell's own, two fertile princi- 
ples had struggled into recognized life upon English 
soil — the principle of Toleration, and the principle of 
free or voluntary churches. These might both of them 
have seemed to be of the very essence of the Reforma- 
tion, but as everybody knows Free Inquiry and Free 
Conscience, the twin pillars of Protestantism in its fun- 
damental theory, were in practise hidden out of sight and 
memory, and as we shall see even Cromwell and his 
Independents shrank from the full acceptance of their 
own doctrines. The advance from the early to the 
later phases of Puritanism was not rapid. Heated as 
the effervescence was, its solid products were slow to 
disengage themselves. Only by steps did the new 
principles of Toleration and the Free Church find a 
place even in the two most capacious understandings 
of the time — in the majestic reason of Milton and the 
vigorous and penetrating practical perceptions of 
Cromwell. 

Puritanism meanwhile profited by the common ten- 
dency among men of all times to set down whatever 
goes amiss to something wrong in government. It is 



46 OLIVER CROMWELL 

in vain for the most part that sage observers like 
Hooker try to persuade us that "these stains and blem- 
ishes, springing from the root of human frailty and 
corruption, will remain until the end of the world, 
what form of government soever take place." Man- 
kind is by nature too restless, too readily indignant, 
too hopeful, too credulous of the unknown, ever to ac- 
quiesce in this. But the English Revolution of the 
seventeenth century was no mere ordinary case of a 
political opposition. The Puritans of the Cromwellian 
time were forced into a brave and energetic conflict 
against misgovernment in church and state. But it 
is to the honor of Puritanism in all its phases that it 
strove with unending constancy, by the same effort to 
pierce inward to those very roots of "human frailty 
and corruption" which are always the true cause of 
the worst mischiefs of an unregenerate world. Puri- 
tanism came from the deeps. It was, like Stoicism, 
Monasticism, Jansenism, even Mohammedanism, a 
manifestation of elements in human nature that are 
indestructible. It flowed from yearnings that make 
themselves felt in Eastern world and Western; it 
sprang from aspirations that breathe in men and 
women of many communions and faiths ; it arose in 
instincts that seldom conquer for more than a brief sea- 
son, and yet are never crushed. An ascetic and un- 
worldly way of thinking about life, a rigorous moral 
strictness, the subjugation of sense and appetite, a cold- 
ness to every element in worship and ordinance exter- 
nal to the believer's own soul, a dogma unyielding as 
cast-iron — all these things satisfy moods and sensibil- 
ities in man that are often silent and fleeting, are easily 
drowned in reaction, but are readily responsive to the 
awakening voice. 

History, as Dollinger has said, is no simple game 



PURITANISM AND THE STATE 47 

of abstractions; men are more than doctrines. It is 
not a certain theory of grace that makes the Reforma- 
tion; it is Luther, it is Calvin. Calvin shaped the 
mold in which the bronze of Puritanism was cast. 
That commanding figure, of such vast power yet some- 
how with so little luster, by his unbending will, his 
pride, his severity, his French spirit of system, his gift 
for government, for legislation, for dialectic in every 
field, his incomparable industry and persistence, had 
conquered a more than pontifical ascendancy in the 
Protestant world. He meets us in England, as in 
Scotland, Holland, France, Switzerland, and the rising 
England across the Atlantic. He was dead (1564) a 
generation before Cromwell was born, but his influence 
was still at its height. Nothing less than to create in 
man a new nature was his far-reaching aim, to regen- 
erate character, to simplify and consolidate religious 
faith. Men take a narrow view of Calvin when they 
think of him only as the preacher of justification by 
faith, and the foe of sacerdotal mediation. His scheme 
comprehended a doctrine that went to the very root of 
man's relations with the scheme of universal things ; a 
church order as closely compacted as that of Rome ; a 
system of moral discipline as concise and as imperative 
as the code of Napoleon. He built it all upon a certain 
theory of the government of the universe, which by 
his agency has exerted an amazing influence upon the 
world. It is a theory that might have been expected 
to sink men crouching and paralyzed into the blackest 
abysses of despair, and it has in fact been answerable 
for much anguish in many a human heart. Still Cal- 
vinism has proved itself a famous soil for rearing 
heroic natures. Founded on St. Paul and on Augustine, 
it was in two or three centuries this : — Before the 
foundations of the world were laid, it was decreed by 



48 OLIVER CROMWELL 

counsel secret to us that some should be chosen out of 
mankind to everlasting salvation, and others to curse 
and damnation. In the figure of the memorable pas- 
sage of the Epistle to the Romans, as the potter has 
power over the clay, so men are fashioned by ante- 
mundane will, some to be vessels of honor and of 
mercy, others to be vessels of dishonor and of wrath. 
Then the Potter has mercy on whom he will have 
mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth. On this black 
granite of Fate, Predestination, and Foreknowledge 
absolute, the strongest of the Protestant fortresses all 
over the world were founded. Well might it have 
been anticipated that fatalism as unflinching as this 
would have driven men headlong into ''desperation 
and wretchlessness of most unclean living." Yet that 
was no more the actual effect of the fatalism of St. 
Paul, Augustine, and Calvin than it was of the fatal- 
ism of the Stoics or of Mohammed. On the contrary, 
Calvinism exalted its votaries to a pitch of heroic 
moral energy that has never been surpassed ; and men 
who were bound to suppose themselves moving in 
chains inexorably riveted, along a track ordained by a 
despotic and unseen Will before time began, have yet 
exhibited an active courage, a resolute endurance, a 
cheerful self-restraint, an exulting self-sacrifice, that 
men count among the highest glories of the human 
conscience. 

It is interesting to think what is the secret of this 
strange effect of the doctrine of fatality; for that was 
the doctrine over which Cromwell brooded in his hours 
of spiritual gloom, and on which he nourished his for- 
titude in days of fierce duress, of endless traverses and 
toils. Is it, as some have said, that people embraced a 
rigorous doctrine because they were themselves by na- 
ture austere, absolute, stiff, just rather than merciful? 




From the portrait atHinchinlirook, by Stone, after Van Dyck, 
by permission of the Earl of Sandwich. 

WILLIAM LAUD ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBL'RY. 



PURITANISM AND THE STATE 49 

Is it, in other words, character that fixes creed, 
or creed that fashions character? Or is there a brac- 
ing- and an exalting effect in the unrewarded moraHty 
of Calvinism; in the doctrine that good works done in 
view of future recompense have no merit ; in that obe- 
dience to duty for its own sake which, in Calvin as in 
Kant, has been called one of the noblest efforts of hu- 
man conscience toward pure virtue? Or, again, is 
there something invigorating and inspiring in the 
thought of acting in harmony with eternal law, how- 
ever grim ; of being no mere link in a chain of mechan- 
ical causation, but a chosen instrument in executing 
the sublime decrees of invincible power and infinite 
intelligence? However we may answer all the in- 
soluble practical enigmas that confronted the Calvin- 
ist, just as for that matter they confront the philo- 
sophic necessarian or determinist of to-day, Calvinism 
was the general theory through which Cromwell 
looked forth upon the world. That he ever argued it 
out, or was of a turn of mind for arguing it out, we 
need not suppose. Without ascending to those clouded 
and frowning heights, he established himself on the 
solid rock of Calvinistic faith that made their base. 

Simplification is the key-word to the Reformation, 
as it is to every other revolution with a moral core. 
The vast fabric of belief, practice, and w^orship w^hich 
the hosts of popes, doctors, schoolmen, founders of 
orders, the saints and sages in all their classes and 
degrees, had with strong brains and devout hearts 
built up in the life and imagination of so many cen- 
turies, was brought back to the ideal of a single simpli- 
fied relation — God, the Bible, the conscience of the in- 
dividual man, and nothing more nor beyond. The 
substitution of the book for the church was the essence 
of the Protestant revolt, and it was the essence of 

4 



50 OLIVER CROMWELL 

Cromwell's whole intellectual being. Like "the Chris- 
tian Cicero," twelve centuries before, he said : "We 
who are instructed in the science of truth by the Holy 
Scriptures know the beginning of the world and its 
end." 

Cromwell's Bible was not what the Bible is to-day. 
Criticism — comparative, chronological, philological, 
historical — had not impaired its position as the direct 
word of God, a single book, one and whole, one page 
as inspired as another, one text as binding as another. 
Faith in the literal construction of the word was pushed 
to an excess as much resembling a true superstition or 
over-belief, as anything imputed to the Catholics. 
Science had set up no reign of law, nor hinted a doubt 
on the probabilities of miraculous intervention. No 
physical theories had dimmed faith in acts of specific 
creation, the aerial perspective and vistas of time were 
very primitive. Whatever happened, great or small, 
was due to wrath or favor from above. When an 
organ was burned down in the new French church at 
the Hague, it was an omen of the downfall of popery 
and prelacy. When the foreman superintending the 
building of a castle for the Queen at Bristol, fell from 
a ladder and broke his neck, it was a stupendous testi- 
mony against the Scarlet Woman. Tiverton by hold- 
ing its market on a Monday made occasion for profan- 
ing the Lord's Day, and so the town was burned to the 
ground. Fishermen one Sabbath morning, the sun 
shining hot upon the water, and a great company of 
salmon at play, were tempted to put forth, and they 
made a great draft, but God's judgment did not halt, 
for never more were fish caught there, and the neigh- 
boring town was half ruined. People were tormented 
by no misgivings, as Ranke says, how "the secrets of 
divine things could be brought into such direct con- 



PURITANISM AND THE STATE 51 

nection with the complications of human affairs." 
The God to whom Cromwell in heart as in speech ap- 
pealed was no stream of tendency, no super-naturalis- 
tic hypothesis, no transcendental symbol or synthesis, 
but the Lord of Hosts of the Old Testament. The 
saints and Puritans were the chosen people. All the 
denunciations of the prophets against the oppressors 
of Israel were applied to the letter against bishops and 
princes. And Moses and Joshua, Gideon and Barak, 
Samson and Jephthah, were the antitypes of those who 
now in a Christian world thought themselves called, 
like those heroes of old time, to stop the mouths of 
lions and turn to flight the armies of the aliens. 

Cromwell is never weary of proclaiming that the 
things that have come to pass have been the wonderful 
works of God, breaking the rod of the oppressor. 
Great place and business in the world, he says, is not 
worth looking after ; he does not seek such things ; he 
is called to them, and is not without assurance that the 
Lord will enable his poor worm to do his will and ful- 
fil His generation. The vital thing is to fear unbelief, 
self-seeking, confidence in the arm of flesh, and opin- 
ion of any instruments that they are other than as dry 
bones. Of dogma he rarely speaks. Religion to him 
is not dogma, but communion with a Being apart from 
dogma. "Seek the lord and his face continually," he 
writes to Richard Cromwell, his son; "let this be the 
business of your life and strength, and let all things 
be subservient and in order to this." To Richard 
Mayor, the father of his son's wife, he says : "Truly 
our work is neither from our own brains nor from our 
courage and strength ; but we follow the Lord who 
goeth before, and gather what he scattereth, that so 
all may appear to be from him." Such is ever the re- 
frain, incessantly repeated, to his family, to the Parlia- 



52 OLIVER CROMWELL 

ment, on the homely occasions of domestic Hfe, in the 
time of public peril, in the day of battle, in the day of 
crowning victory ; this is the spirit by which his soul is 
possessed. All work is done by a divine leading. He 
expresses lively indignation with the Scottish minis- 
ters, because they dared to speak of the battle of Dun- 
bar, that marvelous dispensation, that mighty and 
strange appearance of God's, as a mere "event." So. 
too, he warns the Irish that if they resist they must ex- 
pect what the providence of God will cast upon them, 
"in that which is falsely called the Chance of War." 



Ill 



To displace Calvinism the aims of Laud and of wiser 
men than Laud required a new spiritual basis, and this 
was found in the doctrines of the Dutch Arminius. 
They had arisen in Holland at the beginning of the 
century, marking there a liberal and rationalist reac- 
tion against Calvinist rigor, and they were now wel- 
comed by the Laudians as bringing a needed keystone 
to the quaking double arch of church and state. Ar- 
minianism had been condemned at the Synod of Dort 
(1619) ; but as a half-way house between Catholicism 
on the one hand and Calvinism on the other, it met a 
want in the minds of a rising generation in England 
who disliked Rome and Geneva equally, and sought to 
found an Anglo-Catholic school of their own. Laud 
concerned himself much less with the theology than 
with the latent politics of Arminianism. and in fact he 
usually denied that he was an Arminian. He said, as 
in truth many others in all times and places might have 
said, that the question was one beyond his faculties. 
It was as statesman rather than as keeper of the faith 



PURITANISM AND THE STATE 53 

that he discerned the bearings of the great Dutch 
lieresy, which was to permeate the Church of England 
for many a generation to come. In Arminianism Pre- 
destination was countered by Free Will ; implacable 
Necessity by room for merciful Contingency; Man the 
Machine by Man the self-determining Agent, using 
means, observing conditions. How it is that these 
strong currents and cross-currents of divinity land 
men at the two antipodes in politics, which seem out 
of all visible relation with divinity, we need not here 
attempt to trace. Unseen, non-logical, fugitive, and 
subtle are the threads and fine filaments of air that draw 
opinion to opinion. They are like the occult affinities 
of the alchemist, the curious sympathies of old phy- 
sicians, or the attraction of hidden magnets. All his- 
tory shows us how theological ideas abound in political 
aspects to match, and Arminianism, which in Holland 
itself had sprung into vogue in connection with the 
political dispute between Barneveldt and Prince Mau- 
rice, rapidly became in England the corner-stone of 
faith in a hierarchy, a ceremonial church, and a mon- 
archy. This is not the less true because in time the 
course of events drew some of the Presbyterian pha- 
lanx further away from Calvinism than they would 
have thought possible in earlier days, when, like other 
Puritans, they deemed Arminianism no better than a 
fore-court of popery, atheism, Socinianism, and all the 
other unholy shrines. To the student of opinions 
viewing the theological controversy of Cromwell's 
time with impartial eye, it is clear that, while Calvin- 
ism inspired incomparable energy, concentration, reso- 
lution, the rival doctrine covered a wider range of 
human nature, sounded more abiding depths, and com- 
prehended better all the many varied conditions under 
which the ''poor worm" of Calvin and of Cromwell 



54 OLIVER CROMWELL 

strives to make the best of itself and to work out the 
destinies of its tiny day. "Truth," said Arminius, 
"even theological truth, has been sunk in a deep v^ell, 
whence it cannot be drawn forth without much effort." 
This the wise world has long found out. But these 
pensive sayings are ill suited for a time when the naked 
sword is out of its sheath. Each side believed that it 
was the possessor at least of truth enough to fight for ; 
and what is peculiar in the struggle is that each party 
and sub-division of a party from King Charles down 
to the Leveler and the Fifth Monarchy Man, held his 
ideal of a church inseparably bound up with his ideal 
of the rightly ordered state. 



IV 



In the sardonic dialogue upon these times which he 
called "Behemoth," Hobbes savs that it is not points 
necessary to salvation that have raised all the quarrels, 
but questions of authority and power over the church, 
or of profit and honor to churchmen. In other words, 
it has always been far less a question of what to be- 
lieve, than of whom to believe. "All human questions, 
even those of theologians, have secret motives in the 
conduct and character of those who profess them" 
( Nisard ) . Hobbes' view may be thought to lower the 
dignity of conscience, yet he has many a chapter of 
Western history on his side. Disputes between ortho- 
dox and heretic have mixed up with mysteries of the 
faith all the issues of mundane policy and secular in- 
terest, all the strife of nationality, empire, party, race, 
dynasty. A dogma becomes the watchword of a fac- 
tion ; a ceremonial rite is made the ensign for the am- 
bition of statesmen. The rival armies manceuver on 



PURITANISM AND THE STATE 55 

the theological or the ecclesiastical field, but their im- 
pulse like their purpose is political or personal. It 
was so in the metaphysical conflicts that tore the world 
in the third and fourth centuries of the Christian era, 
and so it was in the controversies that swept over the 
sixteenth century and the seventeenth. 

The center of the storm in England now came to be 
the question that has vexed Western Europe for so 
many generations down to this hour, the cjuestion who 
is to control the law and constitution of the church. 
The Pope and the Councils, answered the Guelph; the 
emperor answered the Ghibelline. This was in the 
early middle age. In England and France the ruling 
power adopted a different line. There kings and law- 
yers insisted that it was for the national or local gov- 
ernment to measure and limit the authority of the 
national branch of the church universal. The same 
principle was followed by the first reformers in Ger- 
many and Switzerland, and by Henry VIII and Cran- 
mer. Then came a third view, not Guelph, nor Ghib- 
elline, nor Tudor. The need for concentration in 
religion had not disappeared ; it had rather become 
more practically urgent, for schism was followed by 
heresy and theological libertinism. Calvin at Geneva 
a generation after Luther, claimed for the spiritual 
power independence of the temporal, just as the Pope 
did, but he pressed another scheme of religious organi- 
zation. Without positively excluding bishops, he 
favored the system by which the spiritual power was 
to reside in a council of presbyters, partly ministers, 
partly laymen. This was the scheme that the strenu- 
ous and powerful character of John Knox had suc- 
ceeded in stamping upon Scotland. It was also the 
scheme that in England was the subject of the dispute 
in Elizabeth's time between Cartwright and Whitgift, 



56 OLIVER CROMWELL 

and the main contention of that famous admonition of 
1572 in which Puritanism is usually supposed to have 
first taken definite shape. During the years when 
Cromwell was attending to his husiness at St. Ives, this 
reorganization of the church upon the lines of the 
Presbyterian churches abroad, marked the direction 
in which serious minds were steadily looking. But 
with no violently revolutionary sense or intention. 
That slowly grew up with events. Decentralization was 
the key in church reform as in political reform; the 
association of laity with bishops, as of commonalty 
with the king. Different church questions hovered in 
men's minds, sometimes vaguely, sometimes with pre- 
cision, rising into prominence one day, dwindling away 
the next. Phase followed phase, and we call the whole 
the Puritan revolution, just as we give the name of 
Puritan alike to Baxter and Hugh Peters, to the ugly 
superstition of Nehemiah Wallington and the glory of 
John Milton — men with hardly a single leading trait in 
common. The Synod of Dort (1619), which some 
count the best date for the origin of Puritanism, was 
twofold in its action ; it ratified election by grace, and 
it dealt a resounding blow to episcopacy. Other topics 
of controversy indeed abounded as time went on. 
Vestment and ceremonial, the surplice or the gown, 
the sign of the cross at baptism, altar or table, sitting 
or kneeling, no pagan names for children, no anointing 
of kings or bishops — all these and similar things were 
matter of passionate discussion, veiling grave differen- 
ces of faith under what look like mere triflings about 
indifferent form. But the power and station of the 
bishop, his temporal prerogative, his coercive jurisdic- 
tion, his usurping arrogance, his subserviences to the 
crown, were what made men's hearts hot within them. 
The grievance was not speculative but actual, not a 



PURITANISM AND THE STATE -:,7 

thing of opinion but of experience and visible circum- 
stance. 

The Reformation had barely touched the authority 
of the ecclesiastical courts though it had rendered that 
authority dependent on the civic power. Down to the 
calling of the Long Parliament, the backslidings of the 
laity no less than of the clergy, in private morals no less 
than in public observance, were by these courts vigi- 
lantly watched and rigorously punished. The penalties 
went beyond penitential impressions on mind and con- 
science, and clutched purse and person. The arch- 
deacon is the eye of the bishop, and his court was as 
busy as the magistrate at Bow Street. In the twelve 
months ending at the date of the assembly of the Long 
Parliament, in the archdeacon's court in London no 
fewer than two thousand persons were brought up for 
tippling, sabbath-breaking, and incontinence. This 
Moral Police of the Church, as it was called, and the 
energy of its discipline, had no small share in the un- 
popularity of the whole ecclesiastical institution. 
Clarendon says of the clergymen of his day in well- 
known words, that "they understand the least, and 
take the worst measure of human affairs, of all man- 
kind that can write and read." In no age have they 
been admired as magistrates or constables. The juris- 
diction of the court of bishop or archdeacon did not 
exceed the powers of a Scottish kirk-session, but there 
was the vital difference that the Scotch court was 
democratic in the foundation of its authority, while 
the English court was a privileged annex of monarchy. 

In loftier spheres the same aspirations after ecclesi- 
astical control in temporal affairs waxed bold. An 
archbishop was made chancellor of Scotland. Juxon, 
the Bishop of London, was made Lord High Trea- 
surer of England. No churchman, says Laud com- 



58 OLIVER CROMWELL 

placently, has had it since the time of Henry the 
Seventh. The Chief Justice goes down to the assizes 
in the west, and issues an injunction to the clergy to 
pubHsh certain judicial orders against feasts and 
wakes. He is promptly called up by Laud for en- 
croaching on church jurisdiction. The king com- 
mands the Chief Justice to recall the orders. He 
disobeys, and is again brought before the council, 
where Laud gives him such a rating that he comes out 
in tears. 
f ,- The issue was raised in its most direct form (No- 
vember, 1628) in the imperious declaration that stands 
prefixed to the thirty-nine articles in the Prayer Book 
of this day. The church-goer of our time, as in a list- 
less moment he may hit upon this dead page, should 
know what indignant fires it once kindled in the breasts 
of his forefathers. To them it seemed the signal for 
quenching truth, for silencing the inward voice, for 
spreading darkness over the sanctuary of the soul. 
The king announces that it is his duty not to suffer un- 
necessary disputations or questions to be raised. He 
commands all further curious search beyond the true, 
usual, literal meaning of the articles to be laid aside. 
Any university teacher who fixes a new sense to one of 
the articles, will be visited by the displeasure of the 
king and the censure of the church; and it is for the 
convocation of the bishops and clergy alone, with 
license under the king's broad seal, to do whatever 
might be needed in respect of doctrine and discipline. 
Shortly before the accession of Charles the same 
spirit of the hierarchy had shown itself in notable 
instructions. Nobody under a bishop or a dean was 
to presume to preach in any general auditory the deep 
points of predestination, election, reprobation, or of 
the universality, resistibility, or irresistibility of divine 



PURITANISM AND THE STATE 59 

grace. But then these were the very points that 
thinking men were interested in. To remove them out 
of the area of pnbhc discussion, while the declaration 
about the articles was meant in due time to strip them 
of their Calvinistic sense, was to assert the royal su- 
premacy in its most odious and intolerable shape. The 
result was what might have been expected. Sacred 
things and secular became one interest. Civil politics 
and ecclesiastical grew to be the same. Tonnage and 
poundage and predestination, ship-money and election, 
habeas corpus and justification by faith, all fell into 
line. The control of Parliament over convocation was 
as cherished a doctrine as its control over the ex- 
chequer. As for toleration, this had hardly yet come 
into sight. Of respect for right of conscience as a 
conviction, and for free discussion as a principle, there 
was at this stage hardly more on one side than on the 
other. Without a qualm the very Parliament that 
fought with such valor for the Petition of Right 
(March, 1629) declared that anybody who should be 
seen to extend or introduce any opinion, whether papis- 
tical, Arminian, or other, disagreeing from the true 
and orthodox church, should be deemed a capital 
enemy of the kingdom and commonwealth. 

It was political and militar}' events that forced a 
revolution in ecclesiastical ideas. Changing needs 
gradually brought out the latent social applications of 
a Puritan creed, and on the double base rose a demo- 
cratic party in a modern sense, the first in the history 
of English politics. Until the middle of the seven- 
teenth century independency was a designation hardly 
used, and Cromwell himself at first rejected it, per- 
haps with the wise instinct of the practical statesman 
against being too quick to assume a compromising 
badge before occasion positively forces. He was never 



6o OLIVER CROMWELL 

much of a democrat, but the same may be said of 
many, if not most, of those whom democracy has used 
to do its business. Calvinism and Jacobinism sprang 
ahke from France, from the same land of absolute 
ideals, and Cromwell was in time already to hear in 
full blast from the grim lips of his military saints the 
right of man as all the world knew them so well a hun- 
dred and fifty years later. 



CHAPTER IV 



THE INTERIM 



WENTWORTH said in his early days that it was 
ill contending with the king outside of Parha- 
ment. Acting on this maxim, the popular leaders, 
with the famous exception of Hampden, watched the 
king's despotic courses for eleven years (1629-40) 
without much public question. Duties were levied 
by royal authority alone. Monopolies were extended 
over all the articles of most universal consumption. 
The same sort of inquisition into title that Wentworth 
had practised m Ireland was applied in England, under 
circumstances of less enormity yet so oppressively that 
the people of quality and honor, as Clarendon calls 
them, upon whom the burden of such proceedings 
mainly fell, did not forget it when the day of reckon- 
ing came. The Star Chamber, the Council, and the 
Court of High Commission, whose province affected 
aft'airs ecclesiastical, widened the area of their arbi- 
trary jurisdiction, invaded the province of the regular 
courts, and inflicted barbarous punishments. Every- 
body knows the cases of Leighton, of Lilburne, of 
Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick ; how for writing books 
against prelacy, or play-acting, or Romish innovations 
by church dignitaries, men of education and learned 

61 



62 OLIVER CROMWELL 

professions were set in the pillory, had their ears cut 
off, their noses slit, their cheeks branded, were heavily 
fined, and flung into prison for so long as the king 
chose to keep them there. 

Even these gross outrages on personal right did less' 
to rouse indignation than the exaction of ship-money; 
nor did the exaction of the impost itself create so much 
alarm as the doctrines advanced by servile judges in 
its vindication, using "a logic that left no man any- 
thing that he might call his own." The famous Italian 
who has earned so bad a name in the world for lower- 
ing the standards of public virtue and human self- 
esteem, said that men sooner forget the slaying of a 
father than the taking of their property. But Charles, 
with the best will to play the Machiavellian if he had 
known how, never more than half learned the lessons 
of the part. 

The general alarms led to passive resistance in 
Essex, Devonshire, Oxfordshire. A stout-hearted 
merchant of the City of London brought the matter on 
a suit for false imprisonment before the King's Bench. 
Here one of the judges actually laid down the doctrine 
that there is a rule of law and a rule of government, and 
that many things which might not be done by the rule 
of law maybe done by the rule of government. In other 
words, law must be tempered by reason of state, which 
is as good as to say no law. With more solemnity 
the lawfulness of the tax was argued in the famous 
case of John Hampden for a fortnight (1637) before 
the twelve judges in the Exchequer Chamber. The 
result was equally fatal to that principle of no taxation 
without assent of Parliament, to which the king had 
formally subscribed in passing the Petition of Right. 
The decision against Hampden contained the startling 
propositions that no statute can bar a king of his 



THE INTERIM 63 

regality; that statutes taking away his royal power in 
defense of his kingdom are void ; and that the king has 
an absolute authority to dispense with any law in cases 
of necessity, and of this necessity he must be the judge. 
This decision has been justly called one of the great 
events of English history. 

Both the system of government and its temper 
wr^re designated by Strafford and Laud under the cant 
watchword of Thorough. As a system it meant per- 
sonal rule in the state, and an authority beyond the law 
courts in the church. In respect of political temper it 
meant the prosecution of the system through thick and 
thin, without fainting or flinching, without half-meas- 
ures or timorous stumbling; it meant vigilance, dex- 
terity, relentless energy. Such was Thorough. The 
counter-watchword w'as as good. If this was the bat- 
tle-cry of the court, Root-and^Branch gradually be- 
came the inspiring principle of reform as it un- 
consciously drifted into revolution. - Things w-ent 
curiously slowly. The country in the face of this con- 
spiracy against law and usage lay to all appearance 
profoundly still. No active resistance was attempted, 
or even w^hispered. Pym kept unbroken silence. Of 
Cromwell we have hardly a glimpse, and he seems to 
have taken the long years of interregnum as patiently 
as most of his neighbors. After some short unquiet- 
ness of the people, says Clarendon, "there quickly fol- 
lowed so excellent a composure throughout the whole 
kingdom that the like peace and tranquillity for ten 
years was never enjoyed by any nation." As we shall 
see, when after eleven years of misgovernment a Par- 
liament was chosen, it was found too moderate for its 
work. 

It was in his native country that Charles first came 
into direct conflict with the religious fervor that was 



64 OLIVER CROMWELL 

to destroy him. It only needed a spark to set in flames 
the fabric that king and archbishop were striving to 
rear in England. This spark flew over the border 
from Scotland, where Charles and Laud played with 
fire. In Scotland the Reformation had been a popular 
movement, springing from new and deepened religious 
experience and sense of individual responsibility in the 
hearts and minds of the common people. Bishops had 
not ceased to exist, but their authority was little more 
than shadow. By the most fatal of the many infatu- 
ations of his life, Charles tried (1637) to make the 
shadow substance, and to introduce canons and a ser- 
vice-book framed by Laud and his friends in England. 
Infatuation as it was, policy was the prompter. 
Charles, Strafford, and Laud all felt that the bonds 
between the three kingdoms were dangerously loose, 
slender, troublesome, and uncertain. As Cromwell 
too perceived when his time came, so these three 
understood the need for union on closer terms between 
England, Scotland, and Ireland, and in accordance 
with the mental fashion of the time they regarded 
ecclesiastical uniformity as the key to political unity. 
Some Scottish historians have held that the royal in- 
novations might have secured silent and gradual acqui- 
escence in time, if no compulsion had been used. Pa- 
tience, alas, is the last lesson that statesmen, rulers, or 
peoples can be brought to learn. As it was the rugged 
Scots broke out in violent revolt, and it spread like 
flame through their kingdom. Almost the whole 
nation hastened to subscribe that famous National 
Covenant (February 27, 1638), which, even as we 
read it in these cool and far-off days, is still vibrating 
and alive with all the passion, the faithfulness, the 
wrath, that inspired the thousands of stern fanatics 



THE INTERIM 65 

who set their hands to it. Its fierce enumeration of 
the ahhorrecl doctrines and practices of Rome, its scorn- 
ful maledictions on them, are hot with the same lurid 
flame as glows in the retaliatory lists of heresy issued 
from age to age from Rome itself. It is in this Na- 
tional Covenant of 1638 that we find ourselves at the 
heart and central fire of militant Puritanism of the 
seventeenth century. 

It is a curious thing that people in England were so 
little alive to what was going on in Scotland until 
the storm broke. Nobody cared to know anything 
about Scotland, and they were both more interested 
and better informed as to what was passing in Ger- 
many or Poland than what happened across the border. 
The king handled Scotch affairs himself, with two or 
three Scotch nobles, and things had come to extrem- 
ities before he opened them either to his counselors or 
to the public in England. An armed force of coven- 
anted Scots was set in motion toward the border. The 
king advanced to York, and there heard such news of 
the obstinacy of the rebels, of the disaffection of his 
own men to the quarrel, and of mischief that might 
follow from too close intercourse between Scots and 
English, that in his bewilderment he sanctioned the 
pacification of Berwick (June, 1639). Disputes arose 
upon its terms; the Scots stubbornly extended their 
demands; Richelieu secretly promised help. Charles 
summoned Strafford to his side from Ireland, and that 
haughty counselor told him that the Scots must be 
v/hipped into their senses again. Then (March, 1640) 
he crossed back to Ireland for money and troops. War 
between the king and his Scots was certain, and it was 
the necessities of this war that led to the first step in 
saving the freedom of England. 

5 



66 OLIVER CROMWELL 



II 



The king, in straits that left him no choice, sought 
aid from ParHament. The Short ParHament, that 
now assembled, definitely opens the first great chapter 
of the Revolution. After twenty years the Restor- 
ation closed it. Eighteen of these years are the public 
life of Cromwell. The movement, it is true, that 
seemed to begin in 1640, itself flowed from forces that 
had been slowly gathering since the death of Elizabeth, 
just as the Restoration closing one chapter prepared 
another that ended in 1688. But the twenty years 
from 1640 to 1660 mark a continuous journey, with 
definite beginning and end. 

Cromwell was chosen one of the two members for 
the borough of Cambridge, "the greatest part of the 
burgesses being present in the hall." The Short Par- 
liament sat only for three weeks (April 13 to May 5), 
and its first proceeding disclosed that eleven years had 
not cooled the quarrel. But the new Parliament was 
essentially moderate and loyal, and this, as I have said, 
is another proof how little of general exasperation the 
eleven years of misrule without a Parliament had pro- 
duced. The veteran Coke was dead. Wentworth 
from firm friend had turned fierce enemy. Sir John 
Eliot was gone. The rigors of his prison-house in the 
Tower could not break that dauntless spirit, but they 
killed him. The king knew well what he was doing, 
and even carried his vindictiveness beyond death. 
Eliot's young son petitioned the king that he might 
carry the remains to Cornwall to lie with those of his 
ancestors. Charles wrote on the petition : ''Let Sir 
John Eliot's body be buried in the parish of that church 
where he died" ; and his ashes lay unmarked in the 
chapel of the Tower. 



THE INTERIM ^j 

Eliot's comrades were left with Pyin at their head, 
and before long they warned the king in words des- 
tined to bear a terrible meaning that Eliot's blood still 
cried for vengeance or for repentance. The case had 
to some extent passed out of the hands of lawyers like 
Selden and antiquaries like Cotton. Burke, in deal- 
ing with the American Revolution, makes some 
weighty comments upon the fact that the greater num- 
ber of the deputies sent to the first Revolutionary Con- 
gress were lawyers ; and the legal character of the 
vindication of civil freedom from the accession of 
James I or earlier, was not wholly lost at Westminster 
until the death of Charles I. But just as the lawyers 
had eclipsed the authority of the churchmen, so now 
they were themselves displaced by country gentlemen 
with gifts of Parliamentary statesmanship. Of this 
new type Pym was a commanding instance. Pym was 
not below Eliot in zeal, and he was better than Eliot 
in measure, in judgment, and in sagacious instinct for 
action. He instantly sounded the note. The redress 
of grievances must go before the grant of a shilling 
either for the Scotch war or anything else. The claim 
of Parliament over prerogative was raised in louder 
tones than had ever been heard in English constitu- 
tional history before. The king supposed that his 
proof that the Scots were trying to secure aid from 
France would kindle the flame of old national antipa- 
thies. England loved neither Frenchmen nor Scots. 
Nations, for that matter, do not often love one another. 
But the English leaders knew the emergency, knew 
that the cause of the Scots was their own, and were as 
ready to seek aid from Frenchmen as their successors a 
generation later were to seek aid from Dutchmen. 
The perception every hour became clearer that the 
cause of the Scots was the cause of England, and with 



68 OLIVER CROMWELL 

wise courage the patriots resolved to address the king 
against a war with his Scottish subjects. When this 
intention reached his ears, though he must have fore- 
seen a move so certain to fit the ParHamentary tactics 
of the hour, Charles flew into a passion, called a coun- 
cil for six o'clock the next morning, and apparently 
with not more than the hesitating approval of Straf- 
ford, hurriedly determined to dissolve the Parliament. 
As usual with him this important decision was due to 
levity, and not to calculation. Before night he found 
out his mistake, and was impatiently asking whether 
he could not recall the body that he had just dismissed. 

The spirits of his opponents rose. Things, they 
argued, must be worse before they could be better. 
This Parliament, they said, would never have done 
what was necessary to be done. Another Parliament 
was inevitable ; then their turn at last would come ; 
then they would meet the king and his ministers with 
their own daring watchword; then in good earnest 
they would press on for Thorough with another and 
an unexpected meaning. For six months the king's 
position became every day more desperate. All the 
wheels of prerogative were set in motion to grind out 
gold. The sheriffs and the bailiffs squeezed only 
driblets of ship-money. Even the judges grew un- 
easy. Charles urged the City for loans, and threw 
aldermen into prison for refusing ; but the City was the 
Puritan stronghold, and was not to be frightened. 
He begged from France, from Spain, from the 
moneyed men of Genoa, and even from the Pope of 
Rome. But neither pope nor king nor banker would 
lend to a borrower who had no security, financial, 
military, or political. He tried to debase the coinage, 
but people refused in fury to take copper for silver or 
threepence for a shilling. 

It was idle for Strafford to tell either the London 



THE INTERIM 69 

citizens or the Privy Council of the unsparing devices 
by which the King of France filled his treasury. 
Whether, if Charles had either himself possessed the 
iron will, the capacious grasp, the deep craft and policy 
of Richelieu, or had committed himself wholly into the 
hands of Strafford, who was endowed with some of 
Richelieu's essentials of mastery, the final event would 
have been different, is an interesting problem for his- 
toric rumination. As it was, the whole policy of 
Thorough fell into ruins. The trained bands were 
called out and commissions of array were issued, but 
they only spread distraction. The convocation of the 
clergy heightened the general irritation, not only by 
continuing against the constitution to sit after the 
Parliament had disappeared, but by framing new 
canons about the eastern position and other vexed 
points of ceremony ; by proclaiming the order of kings 
to be sacred and of divine right ; and finally by winding 
up their unlawful labors with the imposition upon 
large orders of important laymen of an oath never to 
assent to alter the government of the church "by arch- 
bishops, bishops, deans, etc." — an unhappy and ran- 
dom conclusion that provoked much rude anger and 
derision. This proceeding raised in its most direct 
form the central question whether under cover of the 
royal supremacy the clergy were to bear rule indepen- 
dent of Parliament. Even Laud never carried impolicy 
further. Rioters threatened the palace at Lambeth, 
and the archbishop, though no coward, was forced to 
flee for refuge to Whitehall. Meanwhile the king's 
military force, disaffected, ill disciplined, ill paid, and 
ill accoutred, w^as no match for the invaders. The 
Scots crossed the Tyne, beat the English at Newburn 
(August 28), occupied Newcastle, and pushed on to 
Durham and the Tees. There seemed to be nothing 
to hinder their march to London, wrote an observer; 



•JO OLIVER CROMWELL 

people were distracted as if the day of judgment were 
hourly expected. 

Charles again recalled Strafford from Ireland, and 
that courageous genius acquired as much ascendancy 
as the levity of the king would allow. Never came 
any man, he says, to so lost a business : the army alto- 
gether unexercised and unprovided of all necessaries, 
the horse all cowardly, a universal affright in all, a 
general disaffection to the king's service, none sen- 
sible of his dishonor. Nothing could be gloomier. 
A Parliament could not be avoided, as Pym and his 
friends had foreseen, and they brought to bear, both 
through their allies among the peers and by popular 
petitions, a pressure that Charles was powerless to 
resist. On the very eve of the final resolve, the king 
had some reason to suspect that what had already hap- 
pened in Scotland might easily happen in England, 
and that if he did not himself call a Parliament, one 
would be held without him. 

The calling of the Long Parliament marked for the 
king his first great humiliation. The depth of the 
humiliation only made future conflict more certain. 
Everybody knew that even without any deep-laid or 
sinister design Charles's own instability of nature, the 
secret convictions of his conscience, the intrinsic plau- 
sibilities of ancestral kingship, and the temptation of 
accident, would surely draw him on to try his fortune 
again. What was in appearance a step toward har- 
monious cooperation for the good government of the 
three kingdoms, was in truth the set opening of a des- 
perate pitched battle, and it is certain that neither king 
nor Parliament had ever counted up the chances of the 
future. Some would hold that most of the conspicu- 
ous political contests of history have been undertaken 
upon the like uncalculating terms. 



CHAPTER V 



THE LONG PARLIAMENT 



THE elections showed how Charles had failed to 
gage the humor of his people. Nearly three hun- 
dred of the four hundred and ninety members who had 
sat in the Short Parliament were chosen over again. 
Not one of those who had then made a mark in oppo- 
sition was rejected, and the new members were be- 
lieved almost to a man to belong in one degree or 
another to the popular party. Of the five hundred 
names that made up the roll of the House of Commons 
at the beginning of the Long Parliament, the counties 
returned only ninety-one, while the boroughs returned 
four hundred and five, and it was in the boroughs that 
hostility to the policy of the court was the sharpest. 
Yet few of the Commons belonged to the trading class. 
It could not be otherwise when more than four fifths of 
the population lived in the country, when there were 
only four considerable towns outside of London, and 
when the rural classes were supreme. A glance at the 
list shows us Widdringtons and Fenwicks from North- 
umberland; Curzons from Derbyshire; Curwens froin 
Cumberland; Ashtons, Leighs, Shuttleworths, Bridg- 
mans, from Lancashire; Lyttons and Cecils from 
Herts ; Derings and Knatchbulls from Kent ; Ingrams, 

n 



T2 OLIVER CROMWELL 

Wentworths, Cholmeleys, Danbys, Fairfaxes, from the 
thirty seats in Yorkshire; Grenvilles, Edgcombes, 
Bullers, Rolles, Godolphins, Vyvyans, Northcotes, 
Trevors, Carews, from the four-and-forty boroughs 
of Cornwall. 

These and many another historic name make the list 
to-day read like a catalogue of the existing county fam- 
ilies, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the 
House of Lords now contains a smaller proportion of 
ancient blood than the famous lineages that figure in 
the roll of the great revolutionary House of Commons. 
It was essentially an aristocratic and not a popular 
house, as became only too clear five or six years later, 
when Levelers and Soldiers came into the field of poli- 
tics. The Long Parliament was made up of the very 
flower of the English gentry and the educated laity. 
A modern conservati\'e writer describes as the great 
enigma, the question how this phalanx of country 
gentlemen, of the best blood of England, belonging to 
a class of strongly conservative instincts and remark- 
able for their attachment to the crown, should have 
been for so long the tools of subtle lawyers and repub- 
lican theorists, and then have ended by acquiescing 
in the overthrow of the Parliamentary constitution, of 
which they had proclaimed themselves the defenders. 
It is curious too how many of the leaders came from 
that ancient seat of learning which was so soon to be- 
come and for so long remained the center of all who 
held for church and king. Selden was a member for 
the University of Oxford, and Pym, Fiennes, Marten, 
Vane, were all of them Oxford men, as well as Hyde, 
Falkland, Digby, and others who in time passed over 
to the royal camp. A student of our day has re- 
marked that these men collectively represented a 
larger relative proportion of the best intellect of the 




From the portrait by Gerard Soest in the 

National Portrait Gallery. 

EDWARD HYDE, 

FIRST EARL OF CLARENDON. 

From the original portrait at Chequers 

Court, by permission of 

Mrs. Frankland-Russell-Astley. 

LUCIUS GARY, VISCOUNT FALKLAND. 



After a portrait by Van Dyck. 
GEORGE DIGBY, EARL OF BRISTOL. 

After a portrait by Lely, engraved by 
Vertue. 

JOHN SELDEN. 



THE LONG PARLIAMENT 73 

country, of its energy and talents, than is looked for 
now in the House of Commons. Whatever may be 
the reply to the delicate question so stated, it is at any 
rate true that of Englishmen then alive and of mature 
powers only two famous names are missing, Milton and 
Hobbes. When the Parliament opened Dryden was 
a boy at Westminster School ; the future author of 
"Pilgrim's Progress," a lad of twelve, was mending 
pots and kettles in Bedfordshire ; and Locke, the future 
defender of the emancipating principles that now put 
on practical shape and power, was a boy of eight. 
Newton was not born until 1642, a couple of months 
after the first clash of arms at Edgehill. 

In the early days of the Rebellion the peers had 
work to do not any less important than the Commons, 
and for a time, though they had none of the spirit of 
the old barons at Runnymede, they were in tolerable 
agreement with the views and temper of the lower 
House. The temporal peers were a hundred and 
twenty-three, and the lords spiritual twenty-six, of 
whom, however, when the Parliament got really to 
business, no more than eighteen remained. Alike in 
public spirit and in attainments the average of the 
House of Lords was undoubtedly high. Like other 
aristocracies in the seventeenth century, the English 
nobles were no friends to high-flying ecclesiastical pre- 
tensions, and like other aristocrats they were not with- 
out many jealousies and grievances of their own 
against the power of the crown. Another remark is 
worth making. Either history or knowledge of hu- 
man nature might teach us that great nobles often take 
the popular side without dropping any of the preten- 
sions of class in their hearts, and it is not mere peevish- 
ness when the royalist historian says that Lord Say 
and Sele was as proud of his quality and as pleased to 



74 OLIVER CROMWELL 

be distinguished from others by his title as any man 
aHve. 

OHver Cromwell was again returned for the bor- 
ough of Cambridge. The extraordinary circumstance 
has been brought out that at the meeting of the Long 
Parliament Cromwell and Hampden between them 
could count no fewer than seventeen relatives and con- 
nections; and by 1647 the figure had risen from seven- 
teen to twenty-three. When the day of retribution 
came eight years later, out of the fifty-nine names on 
the king's death-warrant, ten were kinsmen of Oliver, 
and out of the hundred and forty of the king's judges 
sixteen were more or less closely allied to him. Oliver 
was now in the middle of his forty-second year, and his 
days of homely peace had come once for all to an end. 
Everybody knows the picture of him drawn by 
a young Royalist; how one morning he "perceived a 
gentleman speaking, very ordinarily appareled in a 
plain cloth suit made by an ill country tailor, with plain 
linen, not very clean, and a speck or two of blood upon 
his little band ; his hat without a hatband ; his stature 
of a good size; his sword stuck close to his side; his 
countenance swollen and reddish ; his voice sharp and 
untunable, his eloquence full of fervor." Says this 
too fastidious observer, ''I sincerely profess it lessened 
much my reverence unto that great council, for this 
gentleman was very much hearkened unto." 

Another recorder of the time describes "his body 
as well compact and strong ; his stature of the average 
height ; his head so shaped as you might see in it both 
a storehouse and shop of a vast treasury of natural 
parts. His temper exceeding fiery; but the flame of 
it kept down for the most part, is soon allayed v/ith 
these moral endowments he had. He was naturally 



THE LONG PARLIAMENT 75 

compassionate toward objects in distress, even to an 
effeminate measure ; though God had made him a heart 
wherein was left Httle room for any fear but what was 
due to Himself, of which there was a large proportion, 
yet did he exceed in tenderness toward sufferers." 

"When he delivered his mind in the House," says a 
third, going beyond the things that catch the visual 
eye, "it was with a strong and masculine excellence, 
more able to persuade than to be persuaded. His ex- 
pressions were hardy, opinions resolute, asseverations 
grave and vehement, always intermixed (Andronicus- 
like) with sentences of Scripture, to give them the 
greater weight, and the better to insinuate into the 
affections of the people. He expressed himself with 
some kind of passion, but with such a commanding, 
wise deportment till, at his pleasure, he governed and 
swayed the House, as he had most times the leading 
voice. Those who find no such wonders in his speeches 
may find it in the effect of them." 

We have yet another picture of the inner qualities 
of the formidable man, drawn by the skilled pencil of 
Clarendon. In the early days of the Parliament, 
Cromwell sat on a Parliamentary committee to ex- 
amine a case of inclosure of waste in his native county. 
The townsmen, it was allowed, had come in a riotous 
and warlike manner with sound of drum and had 
beaten down the obnoxious fences. Such doings have 
been often heard of, but perhaps not half so often as 
they should have been, even down to our own day. 
Lord Manchester, the purchaser of the lands inclosed, 
issued writs against the offenders, and at the same time 
both he and the aggrieved commoners presented peti- 
tions to Parliament. Cromwell moved for a refer- 
ence to a committee. Hyde was chairman, and 



y6 OLIVER CROMWELL 

afterward was often heard to describe the demeanor 
of his turbulent colleague. The scene brings Oliver 
too vividly before us ever to be omitted. 

Cromwell, says Hyde, ordered the witnesses and petitioners 
in the method of the proceeding, and seconded and enlarged 
upon what they said with great passion; and the witnesses 
and persons concerned, who were a very rude kind of people, 
interrupted the council and witnesses on the other side with 
great clamour when they said anything that did not please 
them ; so that Mr. Hyde was compelled to use some sharp re- 
proofs and some threats to reduce them to such a temper that 
the business might be quietly heard. Cromwell, in great fury, 
reproached the chairman for being partial, and that he dis- 
countenanced the witnesses by threatening them; the other 
appealed to the committee, which justified him, and declared 
that he behaved himself as he ought to do ; which more in- 
flamed him [Cromwell] who was already too much angry. 
When upon any mention of matter of fact, or of the proceed- 
ing before and at the enclosure, the Lord Mandevil desired 
to be heard, and with great modesty related what had been 
done, or explained what had been said, Mr. Cromwell did 
answer and reply upon him with so much indecency and 
rudeness, and in language so contrary and offensive, that 
every man would have thought that, as their natures and 
their manners were as opposite as it was possible, so their 
interest could never have been the same. In the end, his 
whole carriage was so tempestuous, and his behaviour so 
insolent, that the chairman found himself obliged to repre- 
hend him, and tell him that if he, Mr. Cromwell, proceeded 
in the same manner, he, Mr. Hyde, would presently adjourn 
the committee, and the next morning complain to the House 
of him. 

Such was the outer Cromwell. 

The twofold impulse of the times has been already 




From the copy in the National Portrait Gallery 
of the original portrait by Van Dyck. 

THOMAS WEXTWORTH, EARL OF STRAFFORD. 



THE LONG PARLIAMENT 77 

indicated, and here is Cromwell's exposition of it: "Of 
the two greatest concernments that God hath in the 
world, the one is that of religion and of the preserva- 
tion of the professors of it; to give them all due and 
just liberty ; and to assert the truth of God. The other 
thing cared for is the civic liberty and interest of the 
nation. Which, though it is, and I think it ought to 
be, subordinate to the more peculiar interest of God, 
yet it is the next best God hath given men in this 
world; and if well cared for, it is better than any rock 
to fence men in their other interests. Besides, if any 
whosoever think the interests of Christians and the in- 
terest of the nation inconsistent, I wish my soul may 
never enter into their secrets." 

Firm in his belief in direct communion with God, a 
sovereign Power unseen; hearkening for the divine 
voice, his steps guided by the divine hand, yet he 
moved full in the world and in the life of the world. 
Of books, as we have seen, he knew little. Of the yet 
more invigorating education of responsible contact 
with large affairs, he had as yet had none. Into men 
and the ways of men, he had enjoyed no opportunity 
of seeing far. Destined to be one of the most famous 
soldiers of his time, he had completed two thirds of his 
allotted span, and yet he had never drilled a troop, nor 
seen a movement in a fight or the leaguer of a stronghold 
or a town. He was both cautious and daring; both 
patient and swift; both tender and fierce; both sober 
and yet willing to face tremendous risks ; both cool in 
head and yet with a flame of passion in his heart. Plis 
exterior rough and unpolished, and with an odd turn 
for rustic buffooneries, he had the quality of directing 
a steady, penetrating gaze into the center of a thing. 
Nature had endowed him with a povx^er of keeping his 
own counsel, that was sometimes to pass for dissimu- 



78 OLIVER CROMWELL 

lation; a keen eye for adjusting means to ends, that 
was often taken for craft; and a high-hearted insis- 
tence on determined ends, that by those who love to 
think the worst was counted as guiky ambition. The 
foundation of the whole was a temperament of energy, 
vigor, resolution. Cromwell was one of the men who 
are born to force great causes to the proof. 



II 



Before this famous Parliament had been many days 
assembled, occurred one of the most dramatic moments 
in the history of English freedom. Strafford was at 
the head of the army at Yori:. When a motion for a 
grand committee on Irish affairs had been carried, his 
friends in London felt that it was he who was struck 
at, and by an express they sent him peremptory warn- 
ing. His friends at York urged him to stay where he 
was. The king and queen, however, both pressed him 
to come, and both assured him that if he came he 
should not suffer in his person, his honor, or his for- 
tune. Strafford, well knowing his peril but un- 
daunted, quickly posted up to London, resolved to 
impeach his enemies of high treason for inviting the 
Scots into the kingdom. Historians may argue for- 
ever about the legalities of what had happened, but the 
two great actors were under no illusions. The only 
question was who should draw his sword first and get 
home the swiftest thrust. The game was a terrible 
one with fierce stakes, my Jicad or thy head; and Pym 
and Strafford knew it. 

The king received his minister with favor, and again 
swore that he would protect him. No king's word 
was ever worse kept. Strafford next morning went 



THE LONG PARLIAMENT 79 

down to the House of Lords, and was received with 
expressions of honor and observance. Unluckily for 
him, he was not ready with his articles of charge, and 
in a few hours it was too late. That afternoon the 
blow was struck. Pym, who had as marked a genius 
for quick and intrepid action as any man that ever sat 
in the House of Commons, rose and said there was 
matter of weight to be imparted. The lobby without 
was quickly cleared, the door was locked, and the key 
laid upon the table. The discussion on Strafford's 
misdeeds in Ireland, and in his government as presi- 
dent of the north, went on until between four and five 
in the afternoon. Then Pym, with some three hun- 
dred members behind him, passed through a throng 
who had been gathered by the tidings that new things 
were on foot, and on reaching the bar of the House of 
Lords he told them that by virtue of a command from 
the Commons in Parliament, and in the name of all 
the Commons of England, he accused Thomas, Earl of 
Strafford, of high treason, and desired his committal 
to prison for a very few days until they produced the 
articles and grounds of their accusation. Strafford 
was in the palace at Whitehall during these proceed- 
ings. The news fell like a thunderbolt upon his 
friends around him, but he kept a composed and con- 
fident demeanor. "I will go," he said, "and look mine 
accusers in the face." "With speed he comes to the 
^ouse; he calls rudely at the door; the keeper of the 
black rod opens; his lordship, with a proud, glooming 
countenance, makes toward his place at the board- 
head; but at once many bid him rid the House." 
When the Lords had settled their course, he was re- 
called, commanded to kneel at the bar, and informed of 
the nature- of his delinquency. He went away in 
custody. "Thus he, whose greatness in the morning 



8o OLIVER CROMWELL 

owned a power over two kingdoms, in tlie evening 
straightened his person betwixt two walls." From 
the Tower, whither he was speedily conveyed, he 
wrote to his wife : 

Albeit all be done against me that art and malice can devise, 
with all the rigour possible, yet I am in great inward quietness, 
and a strong belief God will deliver me out of all these troubles. 
The more I look into my case, the more hope I have, and sure 
if there be any honour and justice left, my life will not be in 
danger ; and for anything else, time, I trust, will salve any other 
hurt which can be done me. Therefore hold up your heart, 
look to the children and your house, let me have your prayers, 
and at last, by God's good pleasure we shall have our de- 
liverance. 

The business lasted for some five months. The actual 
trial began on March 22 (1641), and went on for 
fourteen days. The memorable scene was the asser- 
tion on the grandest scale of the deep-reaching prin- 
ciple of the responsibility of ministers, and it was the 
opening of the last and greatest of the civil wars with- 
in the kingdom. A shrewd eye-witness has told us 
how people began to assemble at five in the morning, 
and filled the hall by seven; how the august culprit 
came at eight, sometimes excusing delay by contrari- 
ety of wind and tide, in a barge from the Tower with a 
guard of musketeers and halberdiers, and he usually 
found the king half an hour before him in an un- 
official box by the side of the queen. "It was daily," 
says Baillie the Covenanter, "the most glorious as- 
sembly the isle can afford ; yet the gravity not such as 
I expected ; oft great clamour without about the doors ; 
in the intervals while Strafford was making ready for 
answers, the Lords got always to their feet, walked 



EXPLANATION OF THE LETTERS ON THE PRINT SHOWING " THE TRVE 
MANER OF THE SITTING OF THE LORDS & COMMONS OF BOTH 
HOWSES OF PARLIAMENT VPON THE TRYAL OF THOMAS EARLE OF 
STRAFFORD, LORD LIEVTENANT OF IRELAND." 

A, the King's mai"<^; B, his feate offtate; C, the Queenes mai''^ ; D, 
the Prince his highnes ; E, Thomas Earle of Arundell, Lord high Steward 
of England; F, the Lord Keeper ; G, the Lord Marques of Winchefter; 
H, the Lord high Chamberlaine of England; I, the Lord Chamberlaine of 
his Mai"^ houfhold ; K, the Lord cheefe luftice of the Kings bench ; L, 
2 Pryui Councellors ; M, the M''- of the rolls ; N, the ludges and Barons 
of the Exchequer ; O, the M"^- of the Chancery ; P, the Earles ; Q, the Vice- 
counts ; R, the Barons ; S, the Knights, Cittizens, & burgefes of the howfe 
of Commons ; T, the Clarkes; V, the Earle of Strafford; W, the Lieutenant 
of the Tower; X, the Plaintiues ; Y, the Deputis councell & officers ; Z, the 
Countes of Arundell; -f> the eldeft Sonnes of fome of the Nobility. 



THE LONG PARLIAMENT 8i 

and clattered; the lower house men too loud clatter- 
ing; after ten hours, much public eating, not only of 
confections but of flesh and bread, bottles of beer and 
wine going thick from mouth to mouth without cups, 
and all this in the king's eye." 

With the impeachment of Strafford the whole posi- 
tion comes directly into view. He divided universal 
hatred with his confederate the archbishop, who had 
been impeached a few days after himself. He was the 
symbol and impersonation of all that the realm had for 
many long years suffered under. In England the 
name of Strafford stood for lawless exactions, arbi- 
trary courts, the free quartering of troops, and the 
standing menace of a papist enemy from the other side 
of St. George's Channel. The Scots execrated him as 
the instigator of energetic war against their country 
and their church. Ireland in all its ranks and classes 
having through its Parliament applauded him as a 
benefactor, now with strange versatility cursed him as 
a tyrant. It was the weight of all these converging 
animosities that destroyed him. "Three whole king- 
doms," says a historian of the time, "were his accusers, 
and eagerly sought in one death a recompense of all 
their sufferings." 

Viewed as a strictly judicial proceeding, the trial of 
Strafford was as hollow as the yet more memorable 
trial in the same historic hall eight years later. The 
expedients for a conviction that satisfied our Lords 
and Commons were little better than the expedients of 
the Revolutionary tribunal in Jacobin Paris at the close 
of the next century. The charges were vague, gen- 
eral, and saturated with questionable inference. The 
evidence, on any rational interpretation of the facts, 
was defective at almost every point. That Strafford 

6 



82 OLIVER CROMWELL 

had been guilty of treason in any sense in which a 
sound tribunal going upon strict law could have con- 
^'icted him, nobody now maintains or perhaps even 
then maintained. Oliver St. John, in arguing the at- 
tainder before the Lords, put the real point. "Why 
should he have law himself who would not that others 
should have any? We indeed give laws to hares and 
deer, because they are beasts of chase; but we give 
none to wolves and foxes, but knock them on the head 
wherever they are found, because they are beasts of 
prey." This was the whole issue — not law, but my 
head or thy head. In revolutions it has often been 
that there is nothing else for it ; and there was nothing 
else for it here. But the revolutionary axe is double- 
edged, and so men found it when the Restoration 
came. 

Meanwhile, the one thing for Pym was to make sure. 
That Strafford designed to subvert what, in the opin- 
ion of the vast majority of Englishmen, were the fun- 
damental liberties of the realm, there was no moral 
doubt though there was little legal proof. That he 
had earned the title of a public enemy ; that his con- 
tinued eligibility for a place in the counsels of the king 
would have been a public danger, and his escape from 
punishment a public disaster; and that if he had not 
been himself struck down, he would have been the first 
to strike down the champions of free government 
against military monarchy — these are the propositions 
that make the political justification of the step taken by 
the Commons when, after fourteen sittings, they began 
to fear that impeachment might fail them. They re- 
sorted to the more drastic proceeding of a bill of at- 
tainder. They were surrounded by imminent danger. 
They knew of plots to bring the royal army down upon 
the Parliament. They heard whispers of the intention 



THE LONG PARLIAMENT 83 

of the French king to send over a force to help his 
sister, and of money coming from the Prince of 
Orange, the king's new son-in-law. Tales came of 
designs for Strafford's escape from the Tower. Above 
all was the peril that the king, in his desperation and 
in spite of the new difficulties in which such a step 
would land him, might suddenly dissolve them. It 
was this pressure that carried the bill of attainder 
through Parliament, though Pym and Hampden at first 
opposed it, and though Selden, going beyond Hyde 
and Falkland who abstained, actually voted against it. 
Men's apprehensions were on their sharpest edge. 
Then it was that the Earl of Essex, rejecting Hyde's 
arguments for merely banishing Strafford, gave him 
the pithy reply, "Stone-dead hath no fellow." 

Only one man could defeat the bill, and this was 
Strafford's master. The king's assent was as neces- 
sary for a bill of attainder as for any other bill, and if 
there was one man who might have been expected to 
refuse assent, it was the king. The bill was passed 
on a Saturday (May 8). Charles took a day to con- 
sider. He sent for various advisers, lay and episcopal. 
Archbishops Usher and Juxton told him, like honest 
men, that if his conscience did not consent, he ought 
not to act, and that he knew Strafford to be innocent. 
In truth Charles a few days before had appealed to the 
Lords not to press upon his conscience, and told them 
that on his conscience he could not condemn his minister 
of treason. Williams, sharper than his two brother 
prelates, invented a distinction between the king's pub- 
lic conscience and his private conscience, not unlike 
that which was pressed upon George III on the famous 
occasion in 1800. He urged that though the king's 
private conscience might acquit Strafford, his public 
conscience ought to yield to the opinion of the judges. 



84 OLIVER CROMWELL 

Strafiford had written to him a week before, and begged 
him to pass the bill. "Sir, my consent shall more 
acquit you herein to God than all the world can do be- 
sides. To a willing man there is no injury done; and 
as by God's grace I forgive all the world with calmness 
and meekness of infinite contentment to my dislodging 
soul, so, sir, to you I can give the life of this world 
with all the cheerfulness imaginable, in the just ac- 
knowledgment of your exceeding favours." Little 
worthy was Charles of so magnanimous a servant. 
Attempts have been made at palliation. The queen, 
it is said, might have been in danger from the anger 
of the multitude. "Let him." it is gravely enjoined 
upon us, "who has seen wife and child and all that he 
holds dear exposed to imminent peril, and has refused 
to save them by an act of baseness, cast the first stone 
at Charles." The equity of history is both a noble and 
a scientific doctrine, but its decrees are not to be settled 
by the domestic affections. Time has stamped the 
abandonment of Strafford with an ignominy that can- 
not be washed out. It is the one act of his life for 
which Charles himself professed remorse. "Put not 
your trust in princes," exclaimed Strafford when he 
learned the facts. "I dare look death in the face," he 
said stoically, as he passed out of the Tower gate to 
the block; "I thank God I am not afraid of death, but 
,do as cheerfully put off my doublet at this time as ever 
J did when I went to my bed." "His mishaps," said 
his confederate. Laud, "were that he groaned under 
the public envy of the nobles, and served a mild and 
gracious prince who knew not how to be nor to be 
made great." 



^ 



CHAPTER VI 



THE EVE OF THE WAR 



WHEN Mary Stuart in 1567 rode away a captive 
from Carberry Hill, she seized the hand of Lord 
Linsay, her foe, and holding it aloft in her grasp, she 
swore by it, "I will have your head for this, so assure 
you." This was in Guise-Tudor blood, and her grand- 
son's passion for revenge if less loud was not less deep. 
The destruction of Strafford and the humiliation that 
his own share in that bitter deed had left in the heart 
of the king, darkened whatever prospect there might 
at any time have been of peace between Charles and 
the Parliamentary leaders. He was one of the men 
vindictive in proportion to their impotence, who are 
never beaten with impunity. His thirst for retaliation 
was unquenchable, as the popular leaders were well 
aware, as they were well aware too of the rising 
sources of weakness in their own ranks. Seeing no 
means of escape, the king assented to a series of re- 
forming bills that swept away the Star Chamber, the 
Court of High Commission, the assumed right to levy 
ship-money, and the other more flagrant civil griev- 
ances of the reign. The verdicts of Hallam have 
grown pale in the flash and glitter of later historians, 
yet there is much to be said for his judgment that all 

85 



86 OLIVER CROMWELL 

the useful and enduring part of the reforming work 
of the Long ParHament was mainly completed within 
the first nine months of its existence. These were all 
measures obviously necessary for the restoration or 
renovation of the constitution, and they stood the test 
of altered times. Most of the rest was writ in water. 

Charles went further and into a new region in agree- 
ing to a law that guaranteed the assembly of a Parlia- 
ment at least once in three years whether with the 
king's consent or without. Further still he went 
when he assented to an act for prolonging the life of 
the sitting Parliament until it should vote for its own 
dissolution (May ii, 1641). Here it was that reform 
passed into revolution. To deprive the monarch of 
the right of taking the sense of his people at his own 
time, and to make dissolution depend upon an act of 
Parliament passed for the occasion, was to go on to 
ground that had never been trodden before. It con- 
vinced the king more strongly than ever that to save 
his crown, in the only sense in which he thought a 
crown worth wearing, he would have to fight for it. 
Yet it was he who had forced the quarrel to this pitch. 
Pym, Cromwell, and the rest were not the men to for- 
get his lawless persecution of Eliot; nor that Charles 
had extinguished Parliaments for eleven years ; nor 
how, even after his return to the constitution only the 
year before, he had petulantly broken the Short Par- 
liament after a session of no more than three weeks. 
It would have been judicial blindness to mistake what 
was actually passing before their eyes. They knew of 
plot upon plot. In April Pym had come upon one 
design among the courtiers to bring up the northern 
army to overawe the Parliament. Almost before this 
was exposed, a second conspiracy of court and officers 
was known to be on foot. It was the Scots who no\A'. 



THE EVE OF THE WAR 87 

as so often, held the key of the position. Charles's 
design was manifestly to win such popularity and in- 
fluence in Scotland, that he might be allowed to use 
the army of that kingdom in concert with his own 
army in the north of England to terrify his mutinous 
Parliament and destroy its leaders. Such a policy was 
futile from its foundation; as if the Scots, who cared 
for their church far more than they cared for his 
crown, were likely to lend themselves to the overthrow 
of the only power that could secure what they cherished 
most, against an unmasked enmity bent on its destruc- 
tion. The defeat of the English Parliament must 
bring with it the discomfiture of Christ's kirk in Scot- 
land. In the month of August Charles left London to 
visit his northern kingdom. The vigilance of the 
Parliament men was not for an instant deceived. 
They promptly guessed that the purpose of his jour- 
ney must be to seek support for reaction, and his rejec- 
tion of their remonstrances against his absence deep- 
ened their suspicion. 

They had indeed more reason than this for uneasi- 
ness. The first of those moments of fatigue had come 
that attend all revolutions. At the beginning of 
civil discord boldness carries all before it ; but a settled 
community, especially one composed of Englishmen, 
soon looks for repose. Hopes are seen to be tinged 
with illusion, the pulse slackens, and the fever cools. 
The nation was after all still Royalist, and had not the 
king redressed their wrongs? Why not rest? This 
was the question of the indolent, the over-cautious, the 
short-sighted and the fearful. Worse than fatigue, the 
spirit of party now raised its questionable crest. 
Philosophers have never explained how it comes that 
faction is one of the inborn propensities of man; nor 
why it should always be that, even where solid reasons 



88 OLIVER CROMWELL 

are absent, almost any distinctions, however slender, 
fleeting, fanciful, or frivolous, will yet serve to found a 
party difference upon. "Zeal for different opinions 
as to religion or government, whether those opinions 
be practical or speculative; attachment to different 
leaders ambitiously contending for preeminence and 
power ; devotion to persons whose fortunes have kin- 
dled human interests and passions — these things have 
at all times so inflamed men as to render them far more 
disposed to vex and oppress each other than to work 
together for the common good." Such is the language 
of Madison about a singular law of human things, that 
has made the spirit of sect and party the master-key 
of so many in the long catalogue of the perversities of 
history. 

It was on the church and its reform that the stren- 
uous phalanx of constitutional freedom began to 
scatter. The Long Parliament had barely been a 
month in session before the religious questions that 
were then most alive of all in the most vigorous minds 
of the time, and were destined to lead by so many 
divisions and subdivisions to distraction in counsel 
and chaos in act, began rapidly to work. Cromwell 
did not hold the helmsman's place so long as Pym sur- 
vived. Clarendon said of Oliver that his parts seemed 
to be raised by the demands of great station, "as if he 
had concealed his faculties until he had occasion to 
use them." In other words, Cromwell fixed his eyes 
upon the need of the hour, used all his energy and de- 
votion in meeting it, and let that suffice. Nor in men 
of action is there any better mark of a superior mind. 
But that Cromwell was "much hearkened to from the 
first" is indicated by the fact that he was specially 
placed upon eighteen of the committees into which the 
House divided itself for the consideration of the mul- 



THE EVE OF THE WAR 89 

titude of grievances that clamored for attention from 
all the shires and boroughs in the land. He moved 
the second reading of the bill for a sitting of Parlia- 
ment every year, and he took a prominent part in the 
committee that transformed the bill into a further 
enactment that a Parliament should meet at least once 
in three years, with or without the crown. 

Going deeper, he was one of the secret instigators of 
the first Parliamentary move of the Root-and-Branch 
men against the bishops, and that move was the first 
step in the development of party spirit within ranks 
that had hitherto been stanchly of one mind. Every- 
body was in favor of church reform but nobody at 
this stage, and certainly not Cromwell, had any clear 
ideas either of the principle on which reform should 
proceed, or of the system that ought to be adopted. 
On those ecclesiastical institutions that were what 
mattered most, they were most at sea. The prevail- 
ing temper was at first moderate. To exclude the 
higher clergy from meddling as masters in secular 
affairs, to stir up the slackness of the lower clergy, to 
nullify canons imposed without assent of Parliament, to 
expunge from the Prayer-book things calculated to give 
offense — such were the early demands. A bill passed 
through the Commons for removing the bishops from 
the House of Lords. The Lords threw it out (June, 
1641), and as usual rejection of a moderate reform 
was followed by a louder cry for wholesale innovation. 
The constitutionalists fell back, and men advanced to 
the front with the root of the matter in them. A month 
after the Lords refused the bishop's bill, the Commons 
passed the Root-and-Branch bill. The Root-and- 
Branch men, besides denouncing the liturgy as fram.ed 
out of the Romish breviary and mass-book, declared 
government by bishops to be dangerous both to church 



90 OLIVER CROMWELL 

and commonwealth, to be .the main cause and occa- 
sion of many foul evils. Only one thing was to be 
done with a government so evil : with all its depen- 
dencies, roots, and branches, it should be forthwith 
swept away. What was to be the substitute nobody 
knew, and when it came to that sovereign and most 
wholesome test for all reformers — the conversion of 
an opinion into the clauses of a bill — neither Cromwell 
nor Vane nor any other of the reformers had anything 
practicable to propose. 

Root-and-Branch was in time confronted by rival 
proposals for moderate Episcopacy. Neither Root- 
and-Branch nor moderate Episcopacy reached an effec- 
tive stage in either House, but the action taken upon 
them split the Parliament in two, one side for Epis- 
copacy, and the other against it. Such were the two 
policies before men on the eve of the civil war. Then, 
by and by, this division gradually adjusted itself with 
disastrous aptness to the other and parallel conflict be- 
tween crown and Parliament ; the partizans of bishops 
slowly turned into partizans of the king, and Episco- 
palians became one with Royalists. The wiser divines 
tried to reconcile the rival systems. Usher, Arch- 
bishop of Armagh, suggested that the bishop should 
have a council of elders. Bramhall, his successor in 
the metropolitan see, whom Cromwell called the Irish 
Laud, admitted the validity of Presbyterian orders, 
and thought the German superintendents almost as 
good as bishops. Baxter, though he afterward de- 
clined a miter, yet always held out a hand to prelacy. 
Leigh ton, one of the few wholly attractive characters 
of those bitter-flavored times, was closely intimate with 
French Jansenists, of whom Hume truly says that they 
were but half Catholics ; and Leighton was wont to 
declare that he would rather turn one single man to be 



THE EVE OF THE WAR 91 

truly of a serious mind, than turn a whole nation to 
mere outer conformity, and he saw no reason why 
there should not be a conjunction between bishops and 
elders. For none of these temperate and healing ideals 
was the time ripe. Their journey was swiftly bring- 
ins: men into a torrid zone. The Commons resolved 
that communion-tables should be removed from the 
east end of churches, that chancels should b^ lev- 
eled, that scandalous pictures of any of the persons of 
the Trinity should be taken away, and all images of the 
Virgin Mary demolished. The consequence was a 
bleak and hideous defacement of beautiful or comely 
things in most of the cathedrals and great churches all 
over England. Altar-rails and screens were de- 
stroyed, painted windows were broken, figures of stone 
and marble ground to powder, and pictures cut into 
shreds. These vandalisms shocked both reverential 
sentiment and the police feeling for good order, and 
they widened the alienation of Parliamentary parties. 
Before the end of the autumn, Hyde and Falkland had 
become king's friends. 

Hyde, more familiarly known by his later style of 
Lord Clarendon, stands among the leading figures of 
the time, had a strong and direct judgment, much inde- 
pendence of character, and ideas of policy that were 
coherent and his own. His intellectual horizons were 
wide, he had good knowledge of the motives of men, 
and understood the handling of large affairs. Even 
where he does not carry us with him, there is nobody 
of the time whose opinion is much better worth know- 
ing. We may even give him the equivocal credit that 
is due to the Clarendonian type of conservative in all 
times and places, that if only things could have been 
different, he would not have been in the wrong. His 
ideal in church and state, viewed in the light of the 



92 OLIVER CROMWELL 

event, did not ultimately miscarry. The settlement of 
1688 would have suited him well enough, and in his 
best days he had much of the temper of Somers. But 
he and Falkland had either too little nerve, or too re- 
fining a conscience, or too unstable a grasp, for the 
navigation of the racing floods around them. They 
were doubtless unwilling converts to the court party, 
but when a convert has taken his plunge he must en- 
dure all the unsuspected foolishness and all the un- 
teachable zealotry of his new comrades — an experience 
that has perhaps in all ages given many a mournful 
hour to generous natures. 

It was now that a majority with a policy found it- 
self confronted with an opposition fluctuating in num- 
bers, but still making itself felt, in the fashion that has 
since become familiar essence of Parliamentary life all 
the world over. As we shall see, a second and deeper 
line of party demarcation was soon to follow. Mean- 
while the division between parties in the Commons was 
speedily attended by disagreement between Commons 
and Lords, and this widened as the rush of events be- 
came more pressing. Among the Lords, too, Charles 
now found friends. It was his own fault if he did not 
discover in the differences among his enemies upon the 
church, a chance of recovering his own shattered au- 
thority in the state. To profit by these differences was 
his persistent game for seven years to come. Seldom 
has any game in political manoeuver been more unskil- 
fully played. 

The Parliament had adjourned early in September, 
the king still absent in Scotland. The superintendence 
of affairs was carried on by a committee, a sort of pro- 
visional government of which Pym was the main- 
spring. Hampden had gone to Edinburgh as a Par- 
liamentary commissioner to watch the king. The two 



THE EVE OF THE WAR 93 

houses reassembled a few days before the end of Octo- 
ber amid intense disquiet. The growing tension made 
the popular leaders at once more energetic and more 
deliberate. Shortly before the adjournment the 
Prayer-book had been attacked, and Cromwell sup- 
ported the attack. Bishops still furnished the occa- 
sion, if they were not the cause, of political action. 
Root-and-Branch was dropped, and a bill was renewed 
for excluding the clergy from temporal authority and 
depriving the bishops of their seats among the Lords. 
Then followed a bill for suspending the bishops from 
Parliamentary powers in the meantime. Cromwell by 
the side of Pym spoke keenly for it, on the ground that 
the bishops by their six-and-twenty votes should not 
be suffered to obstruct the legislative purposes of a 
majority of the two houses. 

Charles, writing from Scotland (October), had an- 
nounced a momentous resolution. "I command you," 
he said to his Secretary of State, "to assure all my 
servants that I am constant to the discipline and doc- 
trine of the Church of England established by Queen 
Elizabeth and my father, and that I resolve by the 
grace of God to die in the maintenance of it." The 
pledge was more tragic than perhaps he knew, but 
when the time came he redeemed it to the letter. As 
a sign that he was in earnest, he proceeded to fill up 
five bishoprics that happened to be vacant, and in four 
of them he planted divines who had in convocation 
been parties to the unlawful canons on which the Com- 
mons were at the moment founding an impeachment 
of treason. This was either one of his many random 
imprudences, or else a calculated challenge. Cromwell 
blazed out instantly against a step that proclaimed the 
king's intention of upholding Episcopacy just as it 
stood. Suddenly an earthquake shook the ground on 



94 OLIVER CROMWELL 

which they stood, and threw the combatants into un- 
expected postures. 



II 



The event that now happened inflamed the pubHc 
mind in England with such horror as had in Europe 
followed the Sicilian Vespers, or the massacre of St. 
Bartholomew, or the slaughter of the Protestants in 
the passes of the Valtelline by the Spanish faction only 
twenty-one years before. In November the news 
reached London that the Irish had broken out in bloody 
rebellion. The story of this dreadful rising has been 
the subject of vehement dispute among historians ever 
since, and even in our own day has been discussed with 
unhistoric heat. Yet the broad facts are sufficiently 
clear to any one capable of weighing the testimxony of 
the time without prejudice of race or faith; and they 
stand out in cardinal importance in respect both to 
leading episodes in the career of Cromwell, and to the 
general politics of the Revolution. 

The causes of rebellion in Ireland lay deep. Con- 
fiscations and exterminations had followed in deadly 
succession, and ever since the merciless suppression of 
the rising of the Ulster chieftains in the reign of Eliza- 
beth, the elements of another violent outbreak had been 
sullenly and surely gathering. Enormous confisca- 
tions had been followed by the plantation of Scotch 
and English colonists, and the clearance of the old 
owners and their people. The colonists thought no 
more of rights and customs in the aboriginal popula- 
tion than if they had been the Matabele or Zulu of a 
later time. Besides the great sweeping forfeitures, 
rapacious adventurers set busily to work with eagle 
eyes to find out flaws in men's title to individual es- 



THE EVE OF THE WAR 95 

tates, and either the adventurer himself acquired the es- 
tates, or forced the possessor to take a new grant at 
an extortionate rent. People were turned off their 
land without compensation and without means of sub- 
sistence. Active men left with nothing to do and 
nothing of their own to live upon, wandered about the 
country, apt upon the least occasion of insurrection or 
disturbance to be heads and leaders of outlaws and 
rebels. Strafford (1632-40), in spite of his success 
upon the surface, had aggravated the evil at its 
source. He had brought the finances into good order, 
introduced discipline into the army, driven pirates out 
of the Channel, imported flax-seed from Holland and 
linen-weavers from France. But nobody blessed or 
thanked him, everybody dreaded the weight of his 
hand, and in such circumstances dread is but another 
word- for hate. The genius of fear had perfected the 
work of fear; but the whole structure of imperial 
power rested on a shaking bog. The great inqui- 
sition into titles had alarmed and exasperated the old 
English. The northern Presbyterians resented his 
proceedings for religious uniformity. The Catholics 
were at heart in little better humor ; for though Straf- 
ford was too deep a statesman to attack them in full 
front, he undoubtedly intended in the fullness of time 
to force them as well as the Presbyterians into the 
same uniformity as his master had designed for Scot- 
land. He would, however, have moved slowly, and 
in the meantime he both practised connivance with the 
Catholic evasion of the law, and encouraged hopes of 
complete toleration. So did the king. But after 
Strafford had gone to his doom in England, Puritan 
influences grew more powerful, and the Catholics per- 
ceived that all the royal promises of complete toleration, 
like those for setting a limit to the time for inquisition 



96 OLIVER CROMWELL 

into titles of land, were so many lies. No Irish con- 
spirator could have laid the train for rebellion more 
effectively. If any one cares to find some more rea- 
sonable explanation of Irish turbulence than the simple 
theory that this unfortunate people in the modern 
phrase have a double dose of original sin, he should 
read the story how^ the O' Byrnes were by chicane, per- 
jury, imprisonment, martial law, application of burn- 
ing gridirons, branding-irons, and strappado, cheated 
out of their lands. 

While these grievances were rankling all over Ire- 
land, and the undying animosities of the dispossessed 
chieftains of Ulster were ready to break into flame, 
priests and friars from Spain had swarmed into the 
land and kindled fresh excitement. No papist con- 
spiracy was needed to account for what soon happened. 
When one deep spring of discontent mounts to a head 
and overflows, every other source becomes a tributary. 
Maddened as they were by wholesale rapine, driven 
forth from land and homes, outraged in every senti- 
ment belonging to their old rude organization, it is no 
wonder if the native Irish and their leaders of ancient 
and familiar name found an added impulse in passion 
for their religious faith. 

At last that happened which the wiser heads had 
long foreseen. After many weeks of strange stillness, 
in an instant the storm burst. The Irish in Ulster sud- 
denly (October 23, 1641) fell upon the English colo- 
nists, the invaders of their lands. The fury soon 
spread, and the country was enveloped in the flames of 
a conflagration fed by concentrated sense of ancient 
wrong, and all the savage passions of an oppressed 
people suddenly broke loose upon its oppressors. 
Agrarian wrong, religious wrong, insolence of race, 
now brought forth their poisonous fruit. A thousand 



THE EVE OF THE WAR 97 

murderous atrocities were perpetrated on one side, and 
they were avenged by atrocities as hideous on the other. 
Every tale of horror ni the insurgents can be matched 
by horror as diaboHc in the soldiery. What happened 
in 1 64 1 was in general features very like what hap- 
pened in 1798, for the same things come to pass in 
every conflict where ferocious hatred in a persecuted 
caste meets the ferocious pride and contempt of its per- 
secutors. The main points are reasonably plain. 
There is no question by whom the sanguinary work 
was first begun. There is little question that it was 
not part of a premeditated and organized design of in- 
discriminate massacre, but was inevitably attendant 
upon a violent rising against foreign despoilers. There 
is no question that though in the beginning agrarian or 
territorial, the rising soon drew after it a fierce struggle 
between the two rival Christian factions. There is 
little question that, after the first shock, Parsons and 
his allies in authority acted on the cynical anticipation 
that the worse the rebellion, the richer would be the for- 
feitures. There is no question that the enormity of 
crime was the subject of exaggeration, partly natural 
and inevitable, partly incendiary and deliberate. Nor 
finally is there any question that, even without exag- 
geration, it is the most barbarous and inhuman chapter 
that stains the domestic history of the kingdom. The 
total number of Protestants slain in cold blood at the 
outbreak of the rebellion has been fixed at various 
figures from four thousand to forty, and the latest 
serious estimate puts it at five-and-twenty thousand 
during the first three or four years. The victims of 
the retaliatory slaughter by Protestants upon Catholics 
were countless, but Sir William Petty thinks that 
more than half a million Irish of both creeds perished 
between 1641 and 1652. 
7 



98 OLIVER CROMWELL 

The fated international antipathy between Enghsh 
and Irish, that Hke a volcano is sometimes active, 
sometimes smoldering and sullen, now broke forth in 
liquid fire. The murderous tidings threw England 
into frenzy. It has been compared to the fury with 
which the American colonists regarded the use of red 
Indians by the government of King George ; or to the 
rage and horror that swept over the country for a mo- 
ment when the tidings of Cawnpore arrived; and I 
need not describe it. The air was thick, as is the way 
in revolutions, with frantic and irrational suspicion. 
The catastrophe in Ireland fitted in with the governing 
moods of the hour, and we know only too well how 
simple and summary are the syllogisms of a rooted dis- 
trust. Ireland was papist, and this was a papist ris- 
ing. The queen was a papist, surrounded at Somerset 
House by the same black brood as those priests of Baal 
who on the other side of St. George's Channel were 
described as standing by while their barbarous flock 
slew old men and women wholesale and in cold blood, 
dashed out the brains of infants against the walls in 
sight of their wretched parents, ran their skeans like 
red Indians into the flesh of little children, and flung 
helpless Protestants by scores at a time over the bridge 
at Portadown. Such was the reasoning, and the 
damning conclusion was clear. This was the queen's 
rebellion, and the king must be her accomplice. Sir 
Phelini O'Neil, the first leader of the Ulster rebellion, 
declared that he held a commission from the king him- 
self, and the story took quick root. It is now manifest 
that Charles was at least as much dismayed as any of 
his subjects; yet for the rest of his life he could never 
wipe out the fatal theory of his guilt. 

That Catholic Ireland should prefer the king to the 
Parliament for a master was to be expected. Puritan- 



THE EVE OF THE WAR 99 

ism with the Old Testament in its hand was never an 
instrument for the go\'ernment of a community pre- 
dominantly Catholic, and it never can be. Nor was it 
ever at any time so ill fitted for such a task as now, 
when it was passionately struggling for its own life 
within the Protestant island. The most energetic 
patriots at Westminster were just as determined to 
root out popery in Ireland, as Philip H had been to 
root out Lutheran or Calvinistic heresy in the United 
Provinces. 

The Irish rebellion added bitter elements to the great 
contention in England. The Parliament dreaded lest 
an army raised for the subjugation of Ireland should 
be used by the king for the subjugation of England. 
The king justified such dread by trying to buy military 
support from the rebel confederates by promises that 
would have gone near to turning Ireland into a sep- 
arate Catholic state. Meanwhile we have to think of 
Ireland as weltering in bottomless confusion. Parlia- 
mentarian Protestants were in the field and Royalist 
Protestants, Anglicans and Presbyterians ; the Scots 
settlers to-day standing for the Parliament, to-morrow 
fighting along with Ormonde for the king ; the Confed- 
erate Catholics, the Catholic gentry of the Pale, all in- 
extricably entangled. Thus we shall see going on for 
nine desperate years the sowing of the horrid harvest, 
which it fell to Cromwell after his manner to gather in. 



to' 



l.ofC, . 



CHAPTER VII 



THE FIVE MEMBERS THE CALL TO ARMS 



THE king returned from Scotland in the latter part 
of November (1641), baffled in his hopes of aid 
from the Scots, but cheered by the prospect of quarrels 
among his enemies at Westminster, expecting to fish 
in the troubled waters in Ireland, and bent on using 
new strength that the converts of reaction were bring- 
ing him for the destruction of the popular leaders. 
The city gave him a great feast, the crowd shouted 
long life to King Charles and Queen Mary, the church 
bells rang, wine was set flowing in the conduits in 
Cornhill and Cheapside, and he went to Whitehall in 
high elation at what he took for counter-revolution. 
Fie instantly began a quarrel by withdrawing the guard 
that had been appointed for the Houses under the com- 
mand of Essex. Long ago alive to their danger, the 
popular leaders had framed that famous exposition of 
the whole dark case against the monarch which is 
known to history as the Grand Remonstrance. They 
now with characteristic energy resumed it. The Re- 
monstrance was a bold manifesto to the public, setting 
out in manly terms the story of the Parliament, its 
past gains, its future hopes, the standing perils with 
which it had to wrestle. The most important of its 

100 



THE FIVE MEMBERS loi 

single clauses was the declaration for church con- 
formity. It was a direct challenge not merely to the 
king, but to the new party of Episcopalian Royal- 
ists. These were not slow to take up the challenge, 
and the fight was hard. So deep had the division now 
become within the walls of the Commons, that the 
Remonstrance was passed only after violent scenes and 
by a narrow majority of eleven (November 22). 

Early in November Cromw^ell made the first pro- 
posal for placing military force in the hands of Parlia- 
ment. All was seen to hang on the power of the 
sword, for the army plots brought the nearness of the 
peril home to the breasts of the popular leaders. A 
month later the proposal, which soon became the 
occasion of resort to arms though not the cause, took 
defined shape. By the Militia Bill the control and 
organization of the trained bands of the counties was 
taken out of the king's hands, and transferred to a 
lord general nominated by Parliament. Next the two 
Houses joined in a declaration that ho religion should 
be tolerated in either England or Ireland except the 
religion established by law. But as the whirlpool be- 
came more angry, bills and declarations mattered less 
and less. Each side knew that the other now intended 
force. Tumultuous mobs found their way day after 
day to hoot the bishops at Westminster. Partizans 
of the king began to flock to Whitehall, they were 
ordered to wear their swords, and an armed guard was 
posted ostentatiously at the palace gate. Angry frays 
followed between these swordsmen of the king and the 
mob armed with clubs and staves, crying out against 
the bishops and the popish lords. The bishops them- 
selves were violently hustled, and had their gowns 
torn from their backs as they went into the House of 
Lords. Infuriated by these outrages, they issued a 



I02 OLIVER CROMWELL 

foolish notification that all done by the Lords in their 
absence would be null and void. This incensed both 
Lords and Commons and added fuel to the general flame, 
and the unlucky prelates were impeached and sent to 
prison. The king tried to change the governor of the 
Tower and to install a reckless swashbuckler of his 
own. The outcry was so shrill that in a few hours the 
swashbuckler was withdrawn. Then by mysterious 
changes of tact he turned first to Pym, next to the 
heads of the moderate Royalists, Hyde, Falkland, and 
Culpeper. The short history of the overtures to Pym 
is as obscure as the relations between Mirabeau and 
Marie Antoinette. Things had in truth gone too far 
for such an alliance to be either desirable or fruitful. 
Events immediately showed that with Charles honest 
cooperation was impossible. No sooner had he estab- 
lished Falkland and Culpeper in his council, than 
suddenly, without disclosing a word of his design, he 
took a step which alienated friends, turned back the 
stream that was running in his favor, handed over the 
Strong fortress of legality to his enemies, and made 
war inevitable. 

Pym had been too quick for Strafford the autumn 
before, and Charles resolved that this time his own 
blow should be struck first. It did not fall upon men 
caught unawares. For many weeks suspicion had 
been deepening that some act of violence upon the pop- 
ular leaders was coming. Suspicion on one side went 
with suspicion on the other. Rumors were in the air 
that Pym and his friends were actually revolving in 
their minds the impeachment of the queen. Whether 
the king was misled by the perversity of his wife and 
the folly of the courtiers, or by his own too ample 
share of these unhappy qualities, he perpetrated the 
most irretrievable of all his blunders. A day or two 



THE FIVE MEMBERS 103 

before, he had promised the Commons that the security 
of every one of them from violence should be as much 
his care as the preservation of his own children. He 
had also assured his new advisers that no step should 
be taken without their knowledge. Yet now he sud- 
denly sent the Attorney-General to the House of Lords, 
there at the table (January 3, 1642) to impeach one of 
their own number and five members of the other 
House, including Pym and Hampden, of high treason. 
Holies, Haselrig, and Strode were the other three. 
No strike of state in history was ever more firmly and 
manfully countered. News came that officers had 
invaded the chambers of the five members and were 
sealing up their papers. The House ordered the im- 
mediate arrest of the officers. A messenger arrived 
from the king to seize the five gentlemen. The House 
sent a deputation boldly to inform the king that they 
would take care that the five members should be ready 
to answer any legal charge against them. 

Next day a still more startling thing was done. 
After the midday adjournment, the benches were again 
crowded, and the five members were in their place. 
Suddenly the news ran like lightning among them, 
that the king was on his way from Whitehall with 
some hundreds of armed retainers. The five members 
were hurried down to the river, and they had hardly 
gained a boat before the king and a band of rufflers 
with swords and pistols entered Westminster Hall. 
Passing through them and accompanied by his nephew, 
the elector Palatine, the king crossed the inviolable 
threshold, advanced uncovered up the floor of the 
House of Commons to the step of the chair, and de- 
manded the five accused members. He asked the 
Speaker whether they were there. The Speaker re- 
plied in words that will never be forgotten, that he had 



I04 OLIVER CROMWELL 

neither eyes nor ears nor tongue in that place but as 
the House might be pleased to direct. " 'T is no mat- 
ter," the king said. "I think my eyes are as good as 
another's." After looking round, he said he saw that 
all his birds were flown, but he would take his own 
course to find them. Then he stammered out a few 
apologetic sentences, and stepping down from the 
chair marched away in anger and shame through the 
grim ranks and amid deep murmurs of privilege out at 
the door. His band of baffled cutthroats followed 
him through the hall with sullen curses at the loss of 
their sport. When next he entered Westminster Hall, 
he was a prisoner doomed to violent death. Cromwell 
was doubtless present, little foreseeing his own part in 
a more effectual performance of a too similar kind in 
the same place eleven years hence. 

Never has so deep and universal a shock thrilled 
England. The stanchest friends of the king were in 
despair. The Puritans were divided between dismay, 
rage, consternation, and passionate resolution. One 
of them, writing in after years of his old home in dis- 
tant Lancashire, says : 'T remember upon the occasion 
of King Charles I demanding the five members of the 
House of Commons. Such a night of prayers, tears, 
and groans I was never present at in all my life: the 
case was extraordinary, and the work was extraordi- 
nary." It was the same in thousands of households all 
over the land. The five members a few days later 
returned in triumph to Westminster. The river was 
alive with boats decked with gay pennons, and the air 
resounded with joyful shouts and loud volleys from 
the primitive firearms of the time. Charles was not 
there to see or hear. Exactly a week after the Attor- 
ney-General had brought up the impeachment of the 




WILLIAM LENTHALL, SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 
From the original portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. 



i 



THE FIVE MEMBERS 105 

five members, he quitted Whitehall (January 10), and 
saw it no more until all had come to an end seven years 
later. 



II 



This daring outrage on law, faith, and honor was 
a provocation to civil war and the beginning of it. 
After such an exploit the defenders of the Parliament 
would have been guilty of a criminal betrayal, if they 
had faltered in facing the issue so decisively raised. 
Pym (January 14) moved that the House should go 
into committee on the state of the kingdom, and Crom- 
well then moved the consideration of means to put the 
kingdom into a posture of defense. Hampden by and 
by introduced a motion to desire the king to put the 
Tower of London and other parts of the kingdom, 
with the militia, into such hands as the Parliament 
might confide in. In this way they came to the very 
essence of the dispute of the hour. Was the king to 
retain the sword? For some weeks debate went on. 
It was suggested to the king that the militia might be 
granted for a time. "By God, not for an hour !" cried 
Charles. "You have asked that of me in this which 
was never asked of a king, and with which I will not 
trust my wife and children." 

As the call to arms was every day more plainly felt 
to be inevitable, it is no wonder that many men on the 
popular side recoiled. The prospect was dreadful, 
and even good patriots may well have asked them- 
selves in anguish whether moderation, temper, good 
will, compromise, might not even now avert it. Pym 
showed here, as always, a consummate mastery of all 
the better arts of Parliamentary leadership. It is not 



io6 OLR^ER CROMWELL 

easy to tell exactly at what moment he first felt that 
peace with the king was hopeless, but at any rate he 
was well assured that it was so now. As they neared 
the edge of the cataract, his instincts of action at once 
braced and steadied him. He was bold, prompt, a 
man of initiative resource and energ}' without fever, 
open and cogent in argument, with a true statesman's 
eye to the demand of the instant, to the nearest ante- 
cedent, to the next step; willing to be moderate when 
moderation did not sacrifice the root of the matter; 
vigorous and uncompromising when essentials were 
in jeopardy. Cromwell too was active both in the 
House and the country, little of an orator but a 
doer. 

Things moved fast. In April the king with an 
armed force demanded admission into Hull, where he 
would have a port for the introduction of arms 
and auxiliaries from abroad. The governor shut 
the gates and drew up the bridge. The king pro- 
claimed him a traitor. This proceeding has always 
been accounted the actual beginning of the great civil 
war. On August 22. 1642, one of the memorable 
dates in our history, on the evening of a stormy day 
Charles raised the royal standard in the courtyard at 
the top of the castle hill at Nottingham. This was the 
solemn symbol that the king called upon his vassals 
for their duty and service. Drums and trumpets 
sounded, and the courtiers and a scanty crowd of on- 
lookers threw up their caps, and cried, "God save King 
Charles and hang up the Roundheads!" But a gen- 
eral sadness, says Clarendon, covered the whole town. 
Melancholy men observed many ill presages, and the 
king himself appeared more melancholy than his wont. 
The standard itself was blown down by an unruly wind 
within a week after it had been set up. This was not 



THE FIVE MEMBERS 107 

the first time that omens had been against the king. 
At his coronation he wore white instead of purple, and 
"some looked on it as an ill presage that the king, lay- 
ing aside his purple, the robe of majesty, should clothe 
himself in white, the robe of innocence, as if thereby 
it were foresignified that he should divest himself of 
that royal majesty which would keep him safe from 
affront and scorn, to rely wholly on the innocence of a 
virtuous life which did expose him finally to calami- 
tous ruin." Still worse was the court preacher's text 
on the same august occasion, chosen from the Book of 
Revelation: "Be thou faithful unto death, and I will 
give thee a crown of life," "more like his funeral ser- 
mon when he was alive, as if he were to have none 
when he was to be buried." 

A day or two after raising the standard, Charles 
appointed to be general of the horse Prince Rupert, the 
third son of his sister the Queen of Bohemia, now in 
his twenty-third year. The boldness, energy, and 
military capacity of the young adventurer were des- 
tined to prove one of the most formidable of all the 
elements in the struggle of the next three years. 
Luckily the intrepid soldier had none of Cromwell's 
sagacity, caution, and patience, or else that "provi- 
dence which men call the fortune of war" might have 
turned out differently. 

The Earl of Essex, son of Queen Elizabeth's favor- 
ite, w^as named general of the Parliamentary forces, 
less for any military reputation than from his social 
influence. "He was the man," said the preacher of his 
funeral sermon (1646). "to break the ice and set his 
first footing in the Red Sea. No proclamation of trea- 
son could cry him down, nor threatening standard 
daunt him that in that misty morning, when men knew 



io8 OLIVER CROMWELL 

not each other, whether friend or foe. by his arising 
dispelled the fog, and by his very name commanded 
thousands into your service." Opinion in most of the 
country was pretty firm on one side or the other, but 
it was slow in mounting to the heat of war. The 
affair was grave, and men went about it with argument 
and conscience. In e\ery manor-house and rectory 
and college, across the counters of shops in the towns, 
on the ale-bench in the villages and on the roads, men 
plied one another with precedents and analogies, with 
Bible texts, with endless points of justice and of expe- 
diency, thus illustrating in this high historic instance 
all the strength and all the weakness of human reason- 
ing, all the grandeur and all the levity of civil and 
ecclesiastical passion. Many, no doubt, shared the 
mind of Hutchinson's father, who was stanch to 
the Parliamentary cause but infinitely desirous that the 
quarrel should come to a compromise, and not to the 
catastrophe of war. Savile said: 'T love religion so 
well, I would not have it put to the hazard of a battle. 
I love liberty so much, I would not trust it in the hands 
of a conqueror : for, much as I love the king , I should 
not be glad that he should beat the Parliament, even 
though they were in the wrong. My desires are to 
have no conquests of either side." Savile was no edi- 
fying character; but a politician who would fain say 
both yes and no stands in a crisis for a numerous host. 
On the other hand, human nature being constant in its 
fundamental colors, w-e may be sure that in both camps 
were many who proclaimed that the dispute must be 
fought out, and the sooner the fight began, the sooner 
would it end. 

Enthusiasts for the rights and religion of their coun- 
try could not believe, says one of them, that a work so 
good and necessary would be attended with so much 




From the original portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. 
RALPH, LORD HOPTON, OF STRATTON, K.B. 



THE FIVE MEMBERS 109 

difficulty, and they went into it in the faith that the 
true cause must quickly win. On the other side, deep- 
rooted interests and ancient sentiment g-athered round 
the crown as their natural center. Selfish men who 
depended upon the crown for honors or substance, and 
unselfish men who were by habit and connection un- 
alterably attached to an idealized church, united accord- 
ing to their diverse kinds in twofold zeal for the king 
and the bishops, in the profound assurance that Provi- 
dence would speedily lay their persecutors low. Fam- 
ilies were divided, close kinsmen became violent foes, 
and brother even slew brother. Some counties were 
almost wholly for the king, while others went almost 
wholly for the Parliament. In either case, the rem- 
nant of a minority, whether the godly or the ungodly, 
found it best to seek shelter outside. There were 
counties where the two sides paired and tried to play 
neutral. The line of social cleavage between the com- 
batants was not definite, but what we are told of Notts 
was probably true of other districts, that most of the 
nobles and upper gentry were stout for the king, while 
most of the middle sort, the able substantial free- 
holders, and commoners not dependent on the malig- 
nants above them, stood for the Parliament. 

Speaking broadly, the feeling for Parliament was 
strongest in London and the east ; the king was strong- 
est in the west and north. Wherever the Celtic ele- 
ment prevailed, as in Wales and Cornwall, the king 
had most friends, and the same is true with qualifica- 
tions in the two other kingdoms of Scotland and Ire- 
land. Where the population was thickest, busiest in 
trade and manufacture and wealthiest, they leaned 
with various degrees of ardor toward the Parliament. 
Yorkshire was divided, the cloth towns south of the 
Aire being Parliamentary. Lancashire, too, was di- 



no OLIVER CROMWELL 

vided, the east for the ParHament. the west for the 
king. The historians draw a Inie from Flamborough 
Head to Plymouth, and with some undulations and 
indentations such a line separates Royalist from Par- 
liamentary England. In East Anglia opinion was 
steadfast through the struggle, but elsewhere it fluc- 
tuated with the fortunes of the war, with the wavering 
inclinations of influential gentry, and with the various 
political issues that rose in bewildering succession after 
the military fight was over. One of the most import- 
ant of all the circumstances of the hour was that the 
fleet (in July, 1642) declared for the Parliament. 

The temper of the time was hard, men were ready 
to settle truth by blows, and life as in the middle ages 
was still held cheap. The Cavalier was hot, unruly, 
scornful, with all the feudal readiness for bloodshed. 
The Roundhead was keen, stubborn, dogged, sustained 
by the thought of the heroes of the Old Testament who 
avenged upon Canaanite and Amalekite the cause of 
Jehovah. Men lived and fought in the spirit of the 
Old Testament, and not of the New. To men of 
the mild and reflecting temper of Chillingworth the 
choice was no more cheerful than between publicans 
and sinners on one side, and scribes and Pharisees on 
the other. A fine instance of the high and manly tem- 
per in which the best men entered upon the struggle is 
to be found in the words used by Sir Wiliam Waller 
to the brave Hopton. "God, who is the searcher of 
my heart," Waller wrote, "knows with what a sad 
sense I go upon this service, and with what a perfect 
hatred I detest this war without an enemy; but I look 
upon it as sent from God, and that is enough to silence 
all passion in me. We are both upon the stage, and must 
act such parts as are assigned us in this tragedy. Let 
us do it in a way of honour and without personal ani- 
mosities." 



THE FIVE MEMBERS iii 

On the whole, the contest in England was stained by 
few of the barbarities that usually mark a civil war, 
especially war with a religious color upon it. But 
cruelty, brutality, and squalor are the essence of all 
war, and here too there was much rough work and some 
atrocity. Prisoners were sometimes badly used, and 
the Parliamentary generals sent great batches of them 
like gangs of slaves to toil under the burning sun in 
the West Indies, or to compulsory service in Venice 
or an American colony. Men were killed in cold 
blood after quarter promised, and the shooting of 
Lucas and Lisle after the surrender of Colchester in 
1648 was a piece of savagery for which Fairfax and 
Ireton must divide the blame between them. The 
ruffianism of war could not be avoided, but it was ruf- 
fianism without the diabolical ferocity of Spaniards in 
the sixteenth century, or Germans in the seventeenth, 
or French sansculottes in the eighteenth. The dis- 
cipline of the royal forces was bad, for their organiza- 
tion was loose ; and even if it had been better, we have 
little difficulty in painting for ourselves the scenes that 
must have attended these roving bands of soldiery, ill- 
paid, ill-fed, and emancipated from all those restraints 
of opinion and the constable which have so much more 
to do with our self-control than we love to admit. 
Nor are we to suppose that all the ugly stories were on 
one side. 



BOOK TWO 



Book tTwo 



CHAPTER I 

CROMWELL IN THE FIELD 

IT is not within my scope to follow in detail the mili- 
tary operations of the civil war. For many 
months they were little more than a series of confused 
marches, random skirmishes, and casual leaguers of 
indecisive places. Of generalship, of strategic sys- 
tem, of ingenuity in scientific tactics, in the early stages 
there was little or none. Soldiers appeared on both 
sides who had served abroad, and as the armed strug- 
gle developed, the great changes in tactics made by 
Gustavus Adolphus slowly found their way into the 
operations of the English war. He suppressed all 
caracoling and parade manoeuvers. Cavalry that had 
formed itself in as many as five or even eight ranks 
deep, was henceforth never marshaled deeper than three 
ranks, while in the intervening spaces were platoons 
of foot and light field-pieces. All this, the soldiers 
tell us, gave prodigious mobility, and made the Swed- 
ish period the most remarkable in the Thirty Years' 
War. But for some time training on the continent 
of Europe seems to have been of little use in the con- 
flicts of two great bands of military, mainly rustic, 
among the hills and downs, the lanes and hedges, the 
rivers and strong places, of England. Modern sol- 
diers have noticed as one of the most curious features 
of the civil war how ignorant each side usually was of 

115 



ii6 OLIVER CROMWELL 

the doings, position, and designs of its opponents. 
Essex stumbled upon the king, Hopton stumbled upon 
Waller, the king stumbled upon Sir Thomas Fairfax. 
The two sides drew up in front of one another, foot in 
the center, horse on the wings ; and then they fell to 
and hammered one another as hard as they could, and 
they who hammered hardest and stood to it longest 
won the day. This was the story of the early engage- 
ments. 

Armor was fallen into disuse, partly owing to the in- 
troduction of firearms, partly perhaps for the reason 
that pleased King James I — because besides protect- 
ing the wearer, it also hindered him from hurting other 
people. The archer had only just disappeared, and 
arrows were shot by the English so late as at the Isle 
of Re in 1627. Indeed at the outbreak of the war 
Essex issued a precept for raising a company of 
archers, and in Montrose's campaign in Scotland bow- 
men are often mentioned. It is curious to modern 
ears to learn that some of the strongest laws enjoining 
practice with bow and arrow should have been passed 
after the invention of gunpowder, and for long there 
were many who persisted in liking the bow better than 
the musket, for the whiz of the arrow over their heads 
kept the horses in terror, and a few horses wounded 
by arrows sticking in them were made unruly enough 
to disorder a whole squadron. A flight of arrows, 
again, apart from those whom they killed or wounded, 
demoralized the rest as they v/atched them hurtling 
through the air. Extreme conservatives made a judi- 
cious mixture between the old time and the new by 
firing arrows out of muskets. The gunpowder of 
those days was so weak that one homely piece of ad- 
vice to the pistoleer was that he should not discharge 
his weapon until he could press the barrel close upon 



CROMWELL IN THE FIELD 117 

the body of his enemy, under the cuirass if possible; 
then he would be sure not to waste his charge. The 
old-fashioned musket-rest disappeared during the Pro- 
tectorate. The shotmen, the musketeers and harque- 
busiers, seem usually to have been to the pikemen in 
the proportion of two to three. It was to the pike and 
the sword that the main work fell. The steel head of 
the pike was well fastened upon a strong, straight, yet 
nimble stock of ash, the whole not less than seventeen 
or eighteen feet long. It was not until the end of the 
century that, alike in England and France, the pike 
was laid aside and the bayonet used in its place. The 
snaphance or flintlock was little used, at least in the 
early stages of the war, and the provision of the slow 
match was one of the difficulties of the armament. 
Clarendon mentions that in one of the leaguers the be- 
sieged were driven to use all the cord of all the beds of 
the town, steep it in saltpeter, and serve it to the sol- 
diers for match. Cartridges, though not unknown, 
were not used in the civil war, and the musketeer went 
into action with his match slowly burning and a couple 
of bullets in his mouth. Artillery, partly from the 
weakness of the powder, partly from the primitive con- 
struction of the mortars and cannon, was a compara- 
tively ineffective arm upon the field, though it was 
causing a gradual change in fortifications from walls 
to earthworks. At Naseby the king had only two 
demi-culverins, as many demi-cannon, and eight sa- 
kers. The first two weighed something over four 
thousand pounds, shot twenty-four pounds, with a 
charge of twelve pounds of powder. The saker was 
a brass gun weighing fifteen hundred pounds, with a 
shot of six or seven pounds. 

It was not, however, upon guns any more than upon 
muskets that the English commander of that age 



ii8 OLIVER CROMWELL 

relied in battle for bearing the brunt whether of at- 
tack or of defense. He depended upon his horsemen, 
either cuirassier or the newly introduced species, 
the dragoons, whom it puzzled the military writers of 
that century whether to describe as horse-footmen or 
foot-horsemen. Gustavus Adolphus had discovered or 
created the value of cavalry, and in the English civil 
war the campaigns were few in which the shock of 
horse was not the deciding element. Cromwell, with 
his quick sagacity, perceived this in anticipation of the 
lessons of experience. He got a Dutch officer to teach 
him drill, and his first military proceeding was to raise 
a troop of horse in his own countryside and diligently 
fit them for action. As if to illustrate the eternal les- 
son that there is nothing new under the sun, some have 
drawn a parallel between the cavalry of the small re- 
publics of Greece in the fourth century before Christ 
and the same arm at Edgehill ; and they find the same 
distinction between the Attic cavalry and the days of 
Alexander, as may be traced between the primitive 
tactics of Oliver or Rupert and those of Frederick the 
Great or Napoleon, 

We are then to imagine Oliver teaching his men 
straight turns to left and right, closing and opening 
their files, going through all the four-and-twenty pos- 
tures for charging, ramming, and firing their pistols, 
petronels, and dragons, and learning the various sounds 
and commands of the trumpet. "Infinite great," says 
an enthusiastic horseman of that time, "are the con- 
siderations which dependeth on a man to teach and 
govern a troop of horse. To bring ignorant men and 
more ignorant horse, wild man and mad horse, to 
those rules of obedience which may crown every mo- 
tion and action with comely, orderly, and profitable 
proceedings — hie labor, hoc opus est." 



CROMWELL IN THE FIELD 119 

Cromwell's troop was gradually to grow into a regi- 
ment of a thousand men, and in every other direction 
he was conspicuous for briskness and activity. He 
advanced considerable sums from his modest private 
means for the public service. He sent down arms into 
Cambridgeshire for its defense. He boldly seized the 
magazine in Cambridge Castle and with armed hand 
stayed the university from sending twenty thousand 
pounds worth of its gold and silver plate for the royal 
use. He was present at the head of his troop in the 
first serious trial of strength between the Parliamen- 
tary forces under the Earl of Essex and the forces of 
the king. The battle of Edgehill (October 23, 1642) 
is one of the most confused transactions in the history 
of the war, and its result was indecisive.^ The Royal- 
ist were fourteen thousand against ten thousand for 
the Parliament, and confiding even less in superior 
numbers than in their birth and quality, they had little 
doubt of making short work of the rebellious and cant- 
ing clowns at the foot of the hill. There was no great 
display of tactics on either side. Neither side appeared 
to know when it was gaining and when it was losing. 
Foes, were mistaken for friends, and friends were 
killed for foes. In some parts of the field the Parlia- 
ment men ran away, while in other parts the king's 
men were more zealous for plundering than for fight. 
When night fell, the conflict by tacit agreement came 
to an end, the Royalists suspecting that they had lost 
the day, and Essex not sure that he had won it. What 
is certain is that Essex's regiment of horse was un- 
broken. "These persons underwritten," says one eye- 
witness, "never stirred from their troops, but they and 

lit is hardly possible to take more to extract a correct and coherent 
pains than Mr. Sanfordtook(" Stud- story out of irreconcilable author- 
ies and Illustrations," pp. 521-528) ities. 



120 OLIVER CROMWELL 

their troops fought till the last minute/' and among the 
names of the valiant and tenacious persons so under- 
written is that of Cromwell. 

Whether before or after Edgehill, it was about 
this time that Cromwell had that famous conversation 
with Hampden which stands to this day among the 
noble and classic commonplaces of English-speaking 
democracy all over the globe. "I was a person," he 
told his second Parliament the year before he died, 
"that from my first employment was suddenly pre- 
ferred and lifted up from lesser trusts to greater, from 
my first being a captain of a troop of horse, and I did 
labor as well as I could to discharge my trust, and God 
blessed me as it pleased him. And I did truly and 
plainly, and then in a way of foolish simplicity as it was 
judged by very great and wise men and good men too, 
desire to make my instruments help me in that work. 
I had a very worthy friend then, and he was a very 
noble person, and I know his memory is very grateful 
to all — Mr. John Hampden. At my first going out 
into this engagement, I saw our men were beaten at 
every hand, and desired him that he would make some 
additions to my Lord Essex's army, of some new regi- 
ments. And I told him I would be serviceable to him 
in bringing such men in as I thought had a spirit that 
would do something in the work. 'Your troops,' 
said I, 'are most of them old decayed serving-men 
and tapsters, and such kind of fellows, and,' said I, 
'their troops are gentlemen's sons and persons of qual- 
ity. Do you think that the spirits of such base and 
mean fellows will ever be able to encounter gentlemen 
that have honor and courage and resolution in them? 
You must get men of spirit, and of a spirit that is 
likely to go on as far as gentlemen will go, or else you 
will be beaten still.' He was a wise and worthy per- 




From a miniature by Cooper at Windsor Castle, by special permission of 
Her Majesty the Queen. 

ROBERT DEVEREUX, EARL OF ESSEX. 



CROMWELL IN THE FIELD 121 

son, and he did think that I talked a good notion, but 
an impracticable one. Truly I told him I could do 
somewhat in it. I did so and truly I must needs say 
that to you, impute it to what you please : / raised 
such men as had the fear of God before them, and made 
some conscience of what they did, and from that day 
forward, I must say to you, they were never beaten, 
and wherever they were engaged against the enemy 
they beat continually. And truly this is matter of 
praise to God, and it hath some instruction in it, to 
own men who are religious and godly. And so many 
of them as are peaceably and honestly and quietly dis- 
posed to live within rules of government, and will be 
subject to those gospel rules of obeying magistrates 
and living under authority — I reckon no godliness 
without that circle '" 

As the months went on, events enlarged Cromwell's 
vision, and the sharp demands of practical necessity 
drew him to adopt a new general theory. In his talk 
with Hampden he does not actually say that if men 
are quietly disposed to live within the rules of govern- 
ment that should suffice. But he gradually came to 
this. The Earl of Manchester had raised to be his 
major-general Lawrence Crawford, afterward to be 
one of Cromwell's bitter gainsayers. Crawford had 
cashiered or suspended one of his captains for the sore 
offense of holding wrong opinions on religion. Crom- 
well's rebuke (March, 1643) i^ ^f the sharpest. 
"Surely you are not well advised thus to turn off one so 
faithful in the cause, and so able to serve you as this 
man is. Give me leave to tell you, I cannot be of your 
judgment ; cannot understand it, if a man notorious for 
wickedness, for oaths, for drinking, hath as great a 
share in your affection as one who fears an oath, who 
fears to sin. Aye, but the man is an Anabaptist. Are 



122 OLIVER CROMWELL 

you sure of that ? Admit that he be, shall that render 
him incapable to serve the public? Sir, the State in 
choosing men to serve it takes no notice of their opin- 
ions; if they be zviUing faitJifully to serve it, that satis- 
fies. I advised you formerly to bear with men of 
different minds from yourself; if you had done it when 
I advised you to do it, I think you would not have had 
so many stumbling-blocks in your way. Take heed of 
being sharp, or too easily sharpened by others, against 
those to whom yon can object little bnt that they square 
not with you in every opinion concerning matters of 
religion. '' 

In laying down to the pragmatical Crawford what 
has become a fundamental of free governments, Crom- 
well probably did not foresee the schism that his 
maxims would presently create in the Revolutionary 
ranks. To save the cause was the cry of all of them, 
but the cause was not to all of them the same. What- 
ever inscription was to be emblazoned on the Parlia- 
mentary banners, success in the field was the one 
essential. Pym and Hampden had perceived it from 
the first appeal to arms and for long before, and they 
had bent all their energies to urging it upon the House 
and inspiring their commanders with their own con- 
viction. Cromwell needed no pressure. He not only 
saw that without military success the cause was lost, 
but that the key to military success must be a force at 
once earnest and well-disciplined; and he applied all 
the keen and energetic practical qualities of his genius 
to the creation of such a force within his own area. He 
was day and night preparing the force that was to show 
its quality on the day of Marston Moor. 'T beseech you 
be careful what captains of horse you choose; a few 
honest men are better than numbers. If you choose 
godly, honest men to be captains of horse, honest men 



CROMWELL IN THE FIELD 123 

will follow them. It may be that it provokes some 
spirits to see such plain men made captains of horse. 
It had been well if men of honor and birth had entered 
into these employments ; but why do they not appear ? 
Who would have hindered them? But seeing it was 
necessary the work should go on, better plain men than 
none; but best to have men patient of wants, faithful 
and conscientious in their employments." Then, in 
famous words that are full of life, because they point 
with emphasis and color to a social truth that always 
needs refreshing: 'T had rather have a plain russet- 
coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves 
what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman 
and is nothing else. I honor a gentleman that is so 
indeed." When Manchester's troops joined him, 
Cromwell found them very bad, mutinous, and un- 
trustworthy, though they were paid almost to the week, 
while his own men were left to depend on what the 
sequestrations of the property of malignants in Hun- 
tingdonshire brought in. Yet, paid or unpaid, his 
troops increased. "A lovely company," he calls them ; 
"they are no Anabaptists, they are honest, sober Chris- 
tians, they expect to be used like men." 

He had good right to say that he had minded the 
public service even to forgetfulness of his own and his 
men's necessities. His estate was small, yet already 
he had given in money between eleven and twelve hun- 
dred pounds. With unwearied zeal he organized his 
county, and kept delinquent churchmen in order. 
"Lest the soldiers should in any tumultuous way at- 
tempt the reformation 01 the cathedral, I require you," 
writes Cromwell to a certain Mr. Hitch at Ely, "to for- 
bear altogether your choir service, so unedifying and of- 
fensive." Mr. Hitch, to his honor, stuck to his service. 
Thereupon Cromwell stamps up the aisle with his hat 



124 OLIVER CROMWELL 

on, calling in hoarse barrack tones to Mr. Hitch, "Leave 
off your fooling, and come down sir." Laud would 
have said just the same to a Puritan prayer-meeting. 
Many more things are unedifying and offensive than 
Cromwell had thought of, whether in Puritan or 
Anglican. 



II 



The time came when the weapon so carefully forged 
and tempered was to be tried. The Royalist strong- 
hold on the Lincolnshire border was Newark, and it 
stood out through the whole course of the war. It is 
in one of the incessant skirmishes in the neighborhood 
of Newark or on the Newark roads, that we have our 
first vision of Cromwell and his cavalry in actual en- 
gagement. The scene was a couple of miles from 
Grantham (May 13, 1643). 

Ten weeks later a more important encounter hap- 
pened at Gainsborough (July 28), and Cromwell has 
described it with a terseness and force that is in strange 
contrast to the turgid and uncouth confusion of his 
speeches. Within a mile and a half of the town they 
meet a body of a hundred of the enemy's horse. Crom- 
well's dragoons labored to beat them back, but before 
they could dismount the enemy charged and repulsed 
them. "Then our horse charged and broke them. The 
enemy being at the top of a very steep hill over our 
heads, some of our men attempted to march up that 
hill; the enemy opposed; our men drove them up and 
forced their passage." By the time they came up they 
saw the enemy well set in two bodies, the horse facing 
Cromwell in front, less than a musket-shot away, and 
a reserve of a full regiment of horse behind. "We en- 
deavored to put our men into as good order as we 



CROMWELL IN THE FIELD 125 

could. The enemy in the meanwhile advanced toward 
us, to take us at disadvantage ; but in such order as we 
were, we charged their great body, I having the right 
wing. We came up horse to horse, where we disputed 
it with our swords and pistols a pretty time, all keep- 
ing close order, 'so that one could not break the other. 
At last, they a little shrinking, our men perceiving it 
pressed in upon them, and immediately routed their 
whole body." The reserve meanwhile stood unbroken. 
Cromwell rapidly formed up three of his own troops 
whom he kept back from the chase, along with four 
troops of the Lincoln men. Cavendish, the Royalist 
general, charged and routed the Lincolners. "Imme- 
diately I fell on his rear with my three troops, which 
did so astonish him that he gave over the chase and 
would fain have delivered himself from me. But I 
pressing on forced them down a hill, having good exe- 
cution of them; and below the hill, drove the general 
with some of his soldiers into a quagmire, where my 
captain slew him with a thrust under his short ribs." 

Whether this thrust under the short ribs was well 
done or not by chivalrous rules, has been a topic of 
controversy. But the battle was not over. After an 
interval the Parliamentarians unexpectedly found 
themselves within a quarter of a mile of a body of 
horse and foot, which was in fact Lord Newcastle's 
army. Retreat was inevitable. Lord Willoughby 
ordered Cromwell to bring ofif both horse and foot. 
"I went to bring them off; but before I returned, 
divers foot were engaged, the enemy advancing with 
his whole body. Our foot retreated in some disorder. 
Our horse also came off with some trouble, being 
wearied with the long fight and their horses tired." 
"But such was the goodness of God," says another nar- 
rator in completion, "giving courage and valor to our 



126 OLIVER CROMWELL 

men and officers, that while Major Whally and Cap- 
tain Ayscough, sometimes the one with four troops 
faced the enemy, sometimes the other, to the exceeding 
glory of God be it spoken, and the great honor of those 
two gentlemen, they with this handful forced the 
enemy so, and dared them to their teeth in at the least 
eight or nine several removes, the enemy following at 
their heels ; and they, though their horses were exceed- 
ingly tired, retreating in order near carbine-shot of the 
enemy, who then followed them, firing upon them; 
Colonel Cromwell gathering up the main body, and 
facing them behind these two lesser bodies — that in 
despite of the enemy we brought off our horse in this 
order without the loss of two men." The military 
critic of our own day marks great improvement be- 
tween Grantham and Gainsborough ; he notes how in 
the second of the two days there is no delay in forming 
up; how the development is rapidly carried out over 
difficult ground, bespeaking well-drilled and flexible 
troops; how the charge is prompt and decisive, with a 
reserve kept well in hand, and then launched trium- 
phantly at the right moment; how skilfully the in- 
fantry in an unequal fight is protected in the eight or 
nine moves of its retreat. 

At Winceby or Horncastle fight, things were still 
better (October ii, 1643). So soon as the men had 
knowledge of the enemy's coming, they were very full 
of joy and resolution, thinking it a great mercy that 
they should now fight with him. and on they went sing- 
ing their psalms, Cromwell in the van. The Royalist 
dragoons gave him a first volley, as he fell with brave 
resolution upon them, and then at half-pistol shot a 
second, and his horse was killed under him. But he 
took a soldier's horse and promptly mounting again 
rejonied the charge, which "was so home-given, and 



CROMWELL IN THE FIELD 127 

performed with so much admirable courage and reso- 
lution, that the enemy stood not another, but were 
driven back on their own body." 

It was clear that a new cavalry leader had arisen in 
England, as daring as the dreaded Rupert, but with a 
coolness in the red blaze of battle, a piercing eye for 
the shifts and changes in the fortunes of the day, above 
all with a power of wielding his phalanx with a com- 
bined steadiness and mobility such as the fiery prince 
never had. Whether Rupert or Oliver was first to 
change cavalry tactics is, among experts, matter of dis- 
pute. The older way had been to fire a volley before 
the charge. The front rank discharged its pistols, 
then opened right and left, and the second rank took 
its place, and so down to the fifth. Then came the 
onset with swords and butt-ends of their firearms. 
The new plan was to substitute the tactics of the shock ; 
for the horse to keep close together, knee to knee, to 
face the enemy front to front, and either to receive the 
hostile charge in steady, strong cohesion, or else in 
the same cohesion to bear down on the foe sword in 
hand, and not to fire either pistol or carbine until they 
had broken through. 

After the war had lasted a year and a half, things 
looked critical for the Parliament. Lincoln stood firm, 
and the eastern counties stood firm, but the king had 
the best of it both in popular favor and military posi- 
tion in the north including York, and the west includ- 
ing Exeter, and the midlands including Bedford and 
Northampton. There seemed also to be a chance of 
forces being released in Ireland, and of relief coming 
to the king from France. The genius of Pym, who 
had discerned the vital importance of the Scots to the 
English struggle at its beginning, now turned to the 
same quarter at the second decisive hour of peril. He 



128 OLIVER CROMWELL 

contrived an alliance with them, raised money for them, 
made all ready for their immediate advance across the 
border, and so opened what was for more reasons than 
one a new and critical chapter in the conflict. 

There were many varying combinations between 
English and Scotch parties from 1639 down to Crom- 
well's crowning victory at Worcester in 165 1. In 
none of them did the alliance rest upon broad and real 
community of aim, sentiment, or policy, and the result 
was that Scotch and English allies were always on the 
verge of open enmity. The two nations were not one 
in temperament, nor spiritual experience, nor political 
requirements ; and even at the few moments when they 
approached a kind of cordiality, their relations were 
uneasy. In Cromwell this uneasiness was from the 
first very near to active resentment. Whether Pym 
was conscious how artificial was the combination, or 
foresaw any of the difficulties that would arise from di- 
vergent aims in the parties to it, we cannot tell. The 
military situation in any case left him no choice, and 
he was compelled to pay the price, just as Charles II 
was when he made his bargain with the Scots seven 
years later. That price was the Solemn League and 
Covenant (September, 1643). This famous engage- 
ment was forced upon the English. They desired a 
merely civil alliance. The Scots, on the other hand, 
convinced from their own experience that Presbytery 
was the only sure barrier of defense against the return 
of the Pope and his legions, insisted that the alliance 
should be a religious compact, by which English. 
Scots, and Irish were to bind themselves to bring the 
churches in the three kingdoms to uniformity in doc- 
trine, church government, and form of worship, so that 
the Lord and the name of the Lord should be one 
throughout the realm. For three years from Pym's 



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After the portrait by Van Dyck. 
WILLIAM CAVENDISH, DUKE (PREVIOUSLY EARL) OF NEWCASTLE. 



CROMWELL IN THE FIELD 129 

bargain the Scots remained on English ground. The 
Scots fought for Protestant uniformity, and the 
EngHsh leaders bowed to the demand with doubtful sin- 
cerity and with no enthusiasm. Puritanism and Pres- 
byterianism were not the same thing, and even Eng- 
lishmen who doubted of Episcopacy as it stood, made 
no secret of their distaste for Presbytery in France, 
Geneva, the Low Countries, or in Scotland. Many 
troubles followed, but statesmanship deals with trou- 
bles as they arise, and Pym's action was a master- 
stroke. 



CHAPTER II 



MARSTON MOOR 



IN 1643 notable actors vanished from the scene. In 
the closing days of 1642 Richelieu, the dictator of 
Europe, had passed away. In a few months he was 
followed by his master, Louis XIII, brother of the 
English queen. Louis XIV, then a child five years 
old, began his famous reign of seventy-two many-col- 
ored years, and Mazarin succeeded to the ascendancy 
and the policy of which Richelieu had given him the 
key. So on our own more dimly lighted stage con- 
spicuous characters had gone. 

Lord Brooke, author of one of the earliest and 
strongest attacks upon Episcopacy, and standing almost 
as high as any in the confidence of the party, was shot 
from an open window while sitting in his chamber, by 
the besieged soldiers in Litchfield Close. On the other 
side the virtuous Falkland, harshly awakened from fair 
dreams of truth and peace by the rude clamor and sav- 
age blows of exasperated combatants, sought death in 
the front rank of the royal forces at the first battle of 
Newbury (September). His name remains when all 
arguments about him have been rehearsed and are at 
an end — one of that rare band of the sons of time, 
soldiers in lost causes, who find this world too vexed 
and rough a scene for them, but to whom history will 
never grudge her tenderest memories. 

130 



MARSTON MOOR 131 

Two figures more important than either of these had 
also disappeared. Hampden had been mortally 
wounded in a skirmish at Chalgrove Field. Then in De- 
cember the long strain of heavy anxieties burdening so 
many years had brought to an end the priceless life of 
Pym, the greatest leader of them all. With these two 
the giants of the first generation fell. The crisis had 
undergone once more a change of phase. The clouds 
hung heavier, the storm was darker, the ship labored 
in the trough. A little group of men next stood in the 
front line, honorable in character and patriotic in in- 
tention, but mediocre in their capacity for war, and 
guided rather by amiable hopes than by a strong- 
handed grasp of shifting and dangerous positions. 
For them too the hour had struck. Essex, Manches- 
ter, Warwick, were slow in motion without being firm 
in conclusion; just and candid, but with no faculty of 
clenching ; unwilling to see that Thorough must be met 
by Thorough ; and of that Fabian type whom the quick 
call for action instead of inspiring irritates. Benevo- 
lent history may mourn that men so good were no 
longer able to serve their time. Their misfortune was 
that misgivings about future solutions dulled their 
sense of instant needs. Cromwell had truer impres- 
sions and better nerve. The one essential was that 
Charles should not come out master in the military 
struggle. Cromwell saw that at this stage nothing 
else mattered; he saw that the Parliamentary liberties 
of the country could have no safety, until the king's 
weapon had been finally struck from his hand. At 
least one other actor in that scene was as keenly alive 
to this as Cromwell, and that was Charles himself. 

It is a mistake to suppose that the patriots and their 
comrades had now at their back a nation at red heat. 
The flame kindled by the attempted arrest of the five 



132 OLIVER CROMWELL 

members, and by the tyranny of the Star Chamber or 
of the bishops, had a Httle sunk. Divisions had arisen, 
and that fatal and famiHar stage had come when men 
on the same side hate one another more bitterly than 
they hate the common foe. New circumstances 
evolved new motives. Some who had been most for- 
ward against the king at first had early fainted by the 
way, and were now thinking of pardon and royal 
favor. Others were men of a neutral spirit, willing 
to have a peace on any terms. Others had got estates 
by serving the Parliament and now wished to secure 
them by serving the king ; while those who had got no 
estates bore a grudge against the party that had over- 
looked them. 

Cromwell in his place warned the House of the dis- 
couragement that was stealing upon the public mind. 
Unless, he said, we have a more vigorous prosecution 
of the war, we shall make the kingdom weary of us 
and hate the name of a Parliament. Even many that 
had at the beginning been their friends, were now say- 
ing that Lords and Commoners had got great places 
and commands and the power of the sword into their 
hands, and would prolong the war in order to per- 
petuate their own grandeur, just as soldiers of fortune 
across the seas spun out campaigns in order to keep 
their own employments. If the army were not put 
upon another footing and the war more vigorously fol- 
lowed, the people could bear the war no longer, but 
would insist upon peace, even rather a dishonorable 
peace than none. 

Almost the same reproaches were brought on the 
other side. This is the moment when Clarendon says 
that it seemed as if the whole stock of affection, loyalty, 
and courage that had at first animated the friends of 
the king were now quite spent, and had been followed 



MARSTON MOOR i33 

up by negligence, laziness, inadvertency, and base de- 
jection of spirit. Mere folly produced as much mis- 
chief to the king's cause as deliberate villainy could 
have done. Charles's own counsels according to 
Clarendon were as irresolute and unsteady as his ad- 
visers were ill-humored and factious. They were all 
blind to what ought to have been evident, and full of 
trepidation about things that were never likely to 
happen. One day they wasted time in deliberating 
without coming to a decision, another day they decided 
without deliberating. Worst of all, decision was never 
followed by vigorous execution. 

At the end of 1642 the king accounted his business 
in Yorkshire as good as done. Here the great man 
was the Earl of Newcastle. He was an accomplished 
man, the patron of good poets like Dryden, and of bad 
poets like Shadwell. He wrote comedies of his own, 
which according to his wife were inspired by the pleas- 
ant and laudable object of laughing at the follies of 
mankind ; and there is a story, probably apocryphal, 
of his entertaining at dinner in Paris no less immortal 
persons than Hobbes and Descartes. A sage Italian, 
dead a hundred years before, warned statesmen that 
there is no worse thing in all the world than levity. 
"Light men are the very instruments for whatever is 
bad, dangerous, and hurtful ; flee from them like fire." 
Of this evil tribe of Guicciardini's was Lord Newcastle; 
and too many of Charles's friends, and in a certain 
sense even Charles himself, were no better. All this, 
however, did not prevent Newcastle, by his vast terri- 
torial influence, popularity, and spirit, from raising in 
the great county of York, in Northumberland, Dur- 
ham, and Westmoreland, a force of nearly seven thou- 
sand men. He had seized the metropolitan city of 
northern England, and he had occupied the city on the 



134 OLIVER CROMWELL 

Tyne from which he took his title. It was the only- 
great port all the way from Plymouth to Berwick by 
which the king could bring arms and ammunition from 
the continent into England. Lord Newcastle was con- 
fronted in Yorkshire by the two Fairfaxes, with many 
though hardly a majority of the gentry of the county 
on their side, and it was in these operations that the 
younger Fairfax, the future Lord General of the Par- 
liament, first showed his gallantry, his dash, his invin- 
cible persistency, and his skill. The Royalist com- 
mander won a stiff fight at Tadcaster before the end of 
the year; and after alternations of capture and re- 
capture at Bradford, Wakefield, and Leeds, by the mid- 
dle of the summer of 1643 he made himself master of 
all the towns in the interior of the county. The Fair- 
faxes were badly beaten (June 30) at Adwalton, a 
ridge above Bradford, and were driven by their thinned 
numbers, by some disaffection among the officers, and 
by occasional lack of bullet, match, and powder, to 
force their way over the waste and hilly moors and to 
throw themselves into Hull, the only important place 
in the county of York now left in the hands of the 
Parliament. 

All through the summer of 1643 the tide of victory 
flowed strong for the king. Newcastle's successes in 
Yorkshire accompanied the successes of Hopton in the 
west. Lord Stamford, with his army of seven thou- 
sand men, had been beaten out of the field at Stratton 
(May, 1643), leaving the king master over all the 
southwest, with the important exception of Plymouth. 
The defeats at Lansdown and Roundway Down (July 
13) had broken up Waller's army. Bristol had fallen 
(July 26). The movements of Essex against Oxford, 
like most of that unlucky general's operations, had 
ended in failure, and he protested to the Parliament 



MARSTON MOOR 135 

that he could not carry on without reinforcements in 
men and money. It seemed as if nothing could pre- 
vent the triumph of a great combined operation by 
which the king should lead his main army down the 
valley of the Thames, while Newcastle should bring 
his northern force through the eastern counties and 
unite with the king in overpowering London. But the 
moment was lost, and the tide turned. For good rea- 
sons or bad, the king stopped to lay siege to Gloucester, 
and so gave time to Essex to recover. This was one 
of the critical events of the war, as it was Essex's one 
marked success. Charles was compelled to raise the 
siege, and his further advance was checked by his re- 
pulse at Newbury (September 20). The other branch 
of the combined movement by which Newcastle was to 
march south was hardly so much as seriously at- 
tempted. 

Newcastle's doings in Yorkshire and their sequel 
prepared the way for that important encounter a year 
later which brought Cromwell into the front rank of 
military captains. For most of that year, from the 
summer of 1643 to the summer of 1644, the power of 
the northern army and the fate of London and the Par- 
liamentary cause turned upon Lincolnshire, the bor- 
derland between Yorkshire and the stubborn counties 
to the southeast. This issue was settled by the cav- 
alry action at Winceby (October, 1643), where the 
united forces of Fairfax and Manchester met a body 
of Royalist contingents from Newcastle, Gains- 
borough, and Lincoln. Cromwell, supported by Fair- 
fax, led the van. His horse was killed under him, and 
as he rose to his feet he was felled by a blow from a 
Royalist trooper. Remounting the horse of a passing 
soldier, he dashed into the fight with his usual stout- 
ness and intrepidity. The same day that saw the Roy- 



136 OLIVER CROMWELL 

alist repulse at Winceby, saw Newcastle raise the siege 
of Hull. Two months later the Scots began their 
march northward, and in January (1644) they crossed 
the border. Cromwell during the spring was occu- 
pied in the convoy of ammunition, in taking fortified 
houses, and other miscellaneous military duties. He was 
soon called to a decisive occasion. Newcastle, after a 
critical repulse at Selby, fell back upon York, where he 
was gradually closed in by Fairfax, Manchester, and 
the Scots. From April to June he held out, until the 
welcome news reached him that Rupert was advancing 
to his relief. Fearing to be caught between two fires, 
the Parliamentary generals drew off. By a series of 
skilful movements, Rupert joined Newcastle within 
the walls of York, and forced him to assent to imme- 
diate engagement with the retreating Parliamentarians. 
It has been said that the two armies who stood face 
to face at Marston (July 2, 1644) were the largest 
masses of men that had met as foes on English ground 
since the wars of the Roses. The Royalist force 
counted seventeen or eighteen thousand men, the Par- 
liamentarians and their Scotch allies twenty-six or 
twenty-seven thousand. The whole were about twice 
as many as were engaged at Edgehill. In our gener- 
ation people may make little of battles where armies of 
only a few thousand men were engaged. Yet we may 
as well remember that Napoleon entered Italy in 1796 
with only thirty thousand men under arms. At Areola 
and at Rivoli he had not over fifteen thousand in the 
field, and even at Marengo he had not twice as many. 
In the great campaign of 1631-32 in the Thirty Years' 
War, the Imperialists were twenty-four thousand foot 
and thirteen thousand horse, while the Swedes were 
twenty-eight thousand foot and nine thousand horse. 
As the forces engaged at Marston were the most nu- 




Frcm the miniature at Windsor Castle, by special permission of 
Her Majesty the Queen. 

THOMAS, LORD FAIRFAX 




From the obverse and reverse of a medal in the British Museum. 
FERDINAND, LORD FAIRFAX. 



MARSTON MOOR 137 

meroiis, so the battle was the bloodiest in the civil war. 
It was also the most singular, for the runaways were 
as many on one side as the other, and the three victori- 
ous generals were all of them fugitives from the field. 
The general course of what happened is fairly intelli- 
gible, though in details all is open to a raking fire of 
historic dotibts.^ 

The two armies faced one another as usual in two 
parallel lines, the foot in the center and the horse on 
the wings. A wide ditch with a hedge on its southern 
side divided them. The Parliamentary forces were 
drawn up on a ridge sloping to the moor. The Scot- 
tish foot under Leven and Bail lie stationed in the 
center, with the Yorkshire army under the two Fair- 
faxes on the right, and Manchester's army of the East- 
ern Association on the left. The younger Fairfax, on 
the right wing, was in command of a body of horse 
counted by some at four thousand, of whom nearly one 
third were Scots. On the left wing Cromwell had 
between two thousand and twenty-five hundred of the 
regular cavalry of the Eastern Association, supported 
by a reserve of about eight hundred ill-horsed Scots in 
the rear. Of this force of cavalry, on which as it hap- 
pened the fortune of the day was to depend, David 
Leslie commanded the Scottish contingent under 
Cromwell, The whole line extended about a mile and 
a half from right to left, and the Royalist line was 
rather longer. On the king's side, Rupert faced 
Oliver. Newcastle and his main adviser Eythin 
faced Leven and Baillie, and Goring faced the two 
Fairfaxes. The hostile lines were so near to one an- 

1 Mr. Firth has closely described Hoenig's " Oliver Cromwell," li. 

the evidence and authorities in the Theil, p. 136, and a more import- 

"Transactions of Royal Historical ant excursus, Bd. ii. pp. 441-453. 
Society," vol. xii. See Colonel 



138 OLIVER CROMWELL 

other that, as Cromwell's scout-master says, "their 
foot was close to our noses." 

So for some five hours (July 21 ) the two hosts with 
colors flying and match burning, looked each other in 
the face. It was a showery summer afternoon. The 
Parliamentarians in the standing corn, hungry and 
wet, beguiled the time in singing hymns. "You can- 
not imagine," says an eye-witness, "the courage, spirit, 
and resolution that was taken up on both sides ; for we 
looked, and no doubt they also, upon this fight as the 
losing or gaining the garland. And now, sir, consider 
the height of difference of spirits : in their army the 
cream of all the Papists in England, and in ours a col- 
lection out of all the corners of England and Scotland, 
of such as had the greatest antipathy to popery and 
tyranny ; these equally thinking the extirpation of each 
other. And now the sword must determine that which 
a hundred years' policy and dispute could not do." 
Five o'clock came, and a strange stillness fell upon 
them all. Rupert said to Newcastle that there would 
be no fight that day, and Newcastle rode to his great 
coach standing not far off, called for a pipe of tobacco, 
and composed himself for the evening. He was soon 
disturbed. At seven o'clock the flame of battle leaped 
forth, the low hum of the two armed hosts in an instant 
charged into fierce uproar, and before many minutes 
the moor and the slope of the hill were covered with 
bloodshed and disorder. Who gave the sign for the 
general engagement we do not know, and it is even 
likely that no sign as the result of deliberate and con- 
certed plan was ever given at all. 

Horse and foot moved down the hill "like so many 
thick clouds." Cromwell, on the Parliamentary left, 
charged Rupert with the greatest resolution that ever 
was seen. It was the first time that these two great 



MARSTON MOOR i39 

leaders of horse had ever met in direct shock, and it 
was here that Rupert gave to Ohver the brave nick- 
name of Ironside. As it happened, this was also one 
of the rare occasions when Oliver's cavalry suffered a 
check. David Leslie with his Scotch troopers was 
luckily at hand, and charging forward together they 
fell upon Rupert's right flank. This diversion enabled 
Oliver, who had been wounded in the neck, to order his 
retreating men to face about. Such a manceuver, say 
the soldiers, is one of the nicest in the whole range of 
tactics, and bears witness to the discipline and flexi- 
bility of Cromwell's force, like a delicate-mouthed 
charger with a consummate rider. With Leslie's aid 
they put Rupert and his cavalry to rout. "Cromwell's 
own division," says the scout-master, "had a hard pull 
of it, for they were charged by Rupert's bravest men 
both in front and flank. They stood at the sword's 
point a pretty while, hacking one another; but at last 
he broke through them, scattering them like a little 
dust." This done, the foot of their own wing charging 
by their side, they scattered the Royalists as fast as they 
charged them, slashing them down as they went. The 
horse carried the whole field on the left before them, 
thinking that the victory was theirs, and that "nothing 
was to be done but to kill and take prisoners." It was 
admitted by Cromwell's partizan that Leslie's chase of 
the broken forces of Rupert, making a rally impossible, 
was what left Cromwell free to hold his men compact 
and ready for another charge. The key to most of 
his victories was his care that his horse when they had 
broken the enemy should not scatter in pursuit. The 
secret a masterful coolness and the flash of military 
perception in the leader, along with iron discipline in 
the men. 

Unfortunately all had gone wrong elsewhere. On 



I40 OLIVER CROMWELL 

the Parliamentary right the operation as conducted 
by Cromwell on the left had been reversed. Sir 
Thomas Fairfax charged Goring, as Cromwell and 
Leslie charged Rupert, and he made a desperate fight 
for it. He cut his way through, chasing a body of 
Goring's force before him on the road south to York. 
When he turned back from his chase, after being 
unhorsed, severely wounded, and with difficulty res- 
cued from the enemy, he found that Goring by a 
charge of savage vigor had completely broken the 
main body of the Parliamentary horse on the right, 
had driven them in upon their own foot, and had even 
thrown the main body of the Scotch foot into dis- 
order. This dangerous moment has been described 
by a Royalist eye-witness. The runaways on both 
sides were so many, so breathless, so speechless, so 
full of fears, that he would hardly have known them 
for men. Both armies were mixed up together, both 
horse and foot, no side keeping their own posts. 
Here he met a shoal of Scots, loud in lamentation as 
if the day of doom had overtaken them. Elsewhere 
he saw a ragged troop reduced to four and a cornet, 
then an officer of foot, hatless, breathless, and with 
only so much tongue as to ask the way to the next 
garrison. 

In the center meanwhile the Parliamentary force 
was completely broken, though the Scotch infantry on 
the right continued stubbornly to hold their ground. 
This was the crisis of the fight, and the Parliamentary 
battle seemed to be irretrievably lost. It was saved 
in a second act by the manful stoutness of a rem- 
nant of the Scots in the center, and still more by the 
genius and energy of Cromwell and the endurance of 
his troopers. Many both of the Scottish and Eng- 
lish foot had taken to flight. Their braver comrades 




From a miniature at Windsor Castle, by special permission of 
Her Majesty the Queen. 

GEORGE, LORD GORING. 



MARSTON MOOR 141 

whom they left behind held firm against assault after 
assault from Newcastle and the Royalists. Crom- 
well, having disposed of Rupert on the left, now 
swept round in the Royalist rear to the point on their 
left where Goring had been stationed before the battle 
began. "Here," says the scout-master, "the business 
of the day, nay, of the kingdom, came to be deter- 
mined.'' Goring's men, seeing Cromwell's manceu- 
ver, dropped their pursuit and plunder, marched down 
the hill, just as Fairfax had marched down it an 
hour before, and speedily came to the same disaster. 

Cromwell keeping his whole force in hand, and 
concentrating it upon the immediate object of beating 
Goring, no sooner succeeded than he turned to the 
next object, and exerted his full strength upon that. 
This next object was now the relief of the harassed 
foot in the center. Attacking in front and flank, he 
threw his whole force upon the Royalist infantry of 
Newcastle, still hard at work on what had been the 
center of the line, supported by a remnant of Goring's 
horse. This was the grand movement which mili- 
tary critics think worthy of comparison with that de- 
cisive charge of Seidlitz and his five thousand horse, 
which gained for Frederick the Great the renowned 
victory at Zorndorf. "Major-General David Leslie, 
seeing us thus pluck a victory out of the enemy's 
hands, could not too much commend us, and professed 
Europe had no better soldiers!" Before ten o'clock 
all was over, and the Royalists beaten from the field 
were in full retreat. In what is sometimes too lightly 
called the vulgar courage of the soldier, neither side 
was wanting. Cromwell's was the only manoeuver 
of the day that showed the talent of the soldier's eye 
or the power of swift initiative. 

More than four thousand brave men lay gory and 



142 OLIVER CROMWELL 

stark upon the field under the summer moon. Of these 
more than three thousand a few hours before had 
gone into the fight shouting, "For God and the king!" 
met by the hoarse counter-shout from the ParHamen- 
tarians, "God with us!" — so confident were each that 
divine favor was on their side. At the famed battle 
of Rocroi the year before, which transferred the lau- 
rels of military superiority from Spain to France, 
eight thousand Spaniards were destroyed and two 
thousand French, out of a total force on both sides 
of some forty-five thousand. 

A story is told of Marston, for which there is as 
good evidence as for many things that men believe. 
A Lancashire squire of ancient line was killed fight- 
ing for the king. His wife came upon the field the 
next morning to search for him. They were strip- 
ping and burying the slain. A general ofiicer asked 
her what she was about, and she told him her melan- 
choly tale. He listened to her with great tenderness, 
and earnestly besought her to leave the horrid scene. 
She complied, and calling for a trooper, he set her 
upon the horse. On her way she inquired the name 
of the officer, and learned that he was Lieutenant-Gen- 
eral Cromwell. 

Cromwell's own references to his first great battle 
are comprised in three or four well-known sentences : 
"It had all the evidences of an absolute victory, ob- 
tained by the Lord's blessing on the godly party prin- 
cipally. We never charged but we routed the enemy. 
The left wing, which I commanded, being our own 
.horse, saving a few Scots in our rear, beat all the 
prince's horse, and God made them stubble to our 
swords. We charged their regiments of foot with 
our horse, and routed all we charged. I believe of 



MARSTON MOOR i43 

twenty thousand the prince hath not four thousand 
left. Give glory, all the glory to God." 

Without dwelling on the question how much the 
stubborn valor of the Scots under Baillie and Lums- 
den against the Royalist assaults on the center had to 
do with the triumphant result, still to describe a force 
nearly one third as large as his own and charging 
side by side with himself, as a few Scots in our rear, 
must be set down as strangely loose. For if one 
thing is more clear than another amid the obscurities 
of Marston, it is that Leslie's flank attack on Rupert 
while the ironsides were falling back, was the key 
to the decisive events that followed. The only plea 
to be made is that Oliver was not writing an official 
despatch, but a hurried private letter announcing to a 
kinsman the calamitous loss of a gallant son upon the 
battlefield, in which fullness of detail was not to be 
looked for. When all justice has been done to the 
valor of the Scots, glory enough was left for Crom- 
well ; and so, when the party dispute was over, the 
public opinion of the time pronounced. 



CHAPTER III 



THE WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY AND THE 
CONFLICT OF IDEALS 



WITH the march of these events a march of ideas 
proceeded, of no less interest for mankind. 
The same commotion that was fast breaking up the 
foundation of the throne had already shaken down 
the church. To glance at this process is no irrele- 
vant excursion, but takes us to the heart of the con- 
tention, and to a central epoch in the growth of the 
career of Cromwell. The only great Protestant coun- 
cil ever assembled on English soil has, for various rea- 
sons, lain mostly in the dim background of our his- 
tory.^ Yet it is no unimportant chapter in the eternal 
controversy between spiritual power and temporal, no 
transitory bubble in the troubled surges of the Refor- 
mation. Dead are most of its topics, or else in the 
ceaseless transmigration of men's ideas as the ages 
pass, its enigmas are now propounded in many altered 
shapes. Still, as we eye these phantoms of old debate, 
and note the faded, crumbling vesture in which once 

1 Since this chapter was first workof importance in its elucidation 
printed Dr. William Shaw has of the controversies of the Westmin- 
published his " History of the Eng- ster Assembly, and otherwise. The 
lish Church during the Civil Wars M mutes of the Assembly were pub- 
and under the Commonwealth," a lished in 1874. 

144 



THE WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY 145 

vivid forms of human thought were clad, we stand 
closer to the inner mind of the serious men and women 
of that time than when we ponder political discus- 
sions either of soldiers or of Parliament. The slow 
fluctuations of the war from Edgehill to Marston left 
room for strange expansions in the sphere of religion 
quite as important as the fortune of battle itself. In 
a puritan age citizenship in the secular state fills a 
smaller space in the imaginations of men, than the 
mystic fellowship of the civitas Dei, the city of God ; 
hence the passionate concern in many a problem that 
for us is either settled or indifferent. Nor should 
we forget what is a main element in the natural his- 
tory of intolerance, that in such times error ranks as 
sin and even the most monstrous shape of sin. 

The aggressions of the Commons upon the old 
church order had begun, as we have seen, by a 
demand for the ejectment of the bishops from the 
Lords. The Lords resisted so drastic a change in the 
composition of their own body (1641). The tide 
rose, passion became more intense, judgment waxed 
more uncompromising, and at the instigation of Crom- 
well and Vane resolute proposals were made in the 
Commons for the abolition of the Episcopal office and 
the transfer to lay commissions instituted and con- 
trolled by Parliament, of Episcopal functions of juris- 
diction and ordination. On what scheme the church 
should be reconstructed neither Cromwell nor Par- 
liament had considered, any more than they consid- 
ered in later years what was to follow a fallen mon- 
archy. In the Grand Remonstrance of the winter of 
1 64 1, the Commons desired a general synod of the 
most grave, pious, learned, and judicious divines of 
this island, to consider all things necessary for the 
peace and good government of the church. It was 



146 OLIVER CROMWELL 

not until the summer of 1643 ^^^^ this synod was at 
last after half a dozen efforts actually appointed by 
Parliament. 

The flames of fanaticism were blazing with a fierce- 
ness not congenial to the English temper, and such 
as has hardly possessed Englishmen before or since. 
Puritanism showed itself to have a most unlovely side. 
It was not merely that controversy was rough and 
coarse, though it was not much less coarse in Puritan 
pulpits than it had been on the lips of German friars 
or Jesuit polemists in earlier stages. In Burton's 
famous sermon for which he suffered punishment so 
barbarous, he calls the bishops Jesuitical polyprag- 
matics, anti-Christian mushrooms, factors for anti- 
Christ, dumb dogs, ravening wolves, robbers of souls, 
miscreants. Even the august genius of Milton could 
not resist the virulent contagion of the time. As diffi- 
culties multiplied, coarseness grew into ferocity. A 
preacher before the House of Commons so early as 
1641 cried out to them: "What soldier's heart would 
not start deliberately to come into a subdued city and 
take the little ones upon the spear's point, to take 
them by the heels and beat out their brains against 
the wall ? What inhumanity and barbarousness 
would this be thought? Yet if this work be to re- 
venge God's church against Babylon, he is a blessed 
man that takes and dashes the little ones against the 
stones." The fiery rage of the old Red Dragon of 
Rome itself, or the wild battle-cries of Islam, were 
hardly less appalling than these dark transports of 
Puritan imagination. Even prayers were often more 
like imprecation than intercession. When Montrose 
lay under sentence of death, he declined the offer of 
the Presbyterian ministers to pray with him, for he 
knew that the address to Heaven would be: "Lord, 



THE WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY 147 

vouchsafe yet to touch the obdurate heart of tliis 
proud, incorrigible sinner, this wicked, perjured, trai- 
torous, and profane person, who refuses to hearken 
to the voice of thy kirk." It was a day of wrath, and 
the gospel of charity was for the moment sealed. 

The ferment was tremendous. Milton, in striking 
words, shows us how London of that time (1644), 
the city of refuge encompassed with God's protec- 
tion, was not busier as a shop of war with hammers 
and anvils fashioning out the instruments of armed 
justice, than it was with pens and heads sitting by 
their studious lamps, musing, searching, and revolv- 
ing new ideas. Another observer of a different spirit 
tells how hardly a day passed (1646) without the 
brewing or broaching of some new opinion. People 
are said to esteem an opinion a mere diurnal — after a 
day or two scarce worth the keeping. "If any man 
have lost his religion, let him repair to London, and 
I'll warrant him he shall find it. I had almost said, 
too, and if any man has a religion, let him come but 
hither now, and he shall go near to lose it." Well 
might the zealots of uniformity tremble. Louder 
and more incessant, says Baxter, than disputes about 
infant baptism or antinomianism, waxed their call 
for liberty of conscience, that every man might preach 
and do in matters of religion what he pleased. All 
these disputes, and the matters of them, found a focus 
in the Westminster Assembly of Divines. 

It was nominally composed of one hundred and 
fifty members, including not only Anglicans, but An- 
glican bishops, and comprehending, besides divines, 
ten lay peers and twice as many members of the other 
House. Eight Scottish commissioners were included. 
The Anglicans never came, or else they immediately 
fell off; the laymen, with the notable exception of 



148 OLIVER CROMWELL 

Selden, took but a secondary part; and it became 
essentially a body of divines, usually some sixty of 
them in attendance. The field appointed for their 
toil was indeed enormous. It was nothing less than 
the reorganization of the spiritual power, subject to 
the shifting exigencies of the temporal, with divers 
patterns to choose from in the reformed churches out 
of England. Faith, worship, discipline, government, 
were all comprehended in their vast operation. They 
were instructed to organize a scheme for a church; to 
compose a directory in place of the Prayer Book ; to 
set forth in a confession of faith what men must be- 
lieve ; to draw up a catechism for teaching the true 
creed. Work that in itself would have sufficed for 
giants, was complicated by the play of politics out- 
side, and the necessity of serving many changing mas- 
ters. The important point is that their masters were 
laymen. The assembly was simply to advise. Par- 
liament had no more intention of letting the divines 
escape its own direct control than Henry VIII or Eliz- 
abeth would have had. The assembly was the creature 
of a Parliamentary ordinance. To Parliament it must 
report, and without assent of Parliament its proceed- 
ings must come to naught. This was not all. The Sol- 
emn League and Covenant in the autumn of 1643 
and the entry of the Scots upon the scene, gave a 
new turn to religious forces, and ended in a remark- 
able transformation of political parties. The Scots 
had exacted the Covenant from the Parliamentary 
leaders as the price of military aid, and the Covenant 
meant the reconstruction of the English Church, not 
upon the lines of modified Episcopacy or Presbytery 
regulated by lay supremacy but upon Presbytery after 
the Scottish model of church government by clerical 
assemblies. 



THE WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY 149 

The divines first met in Henry VH's chapel (July 
1, 1643), ^^^^t when the weather grew colder they 
moved into the Jerusalem Chamber — that old-world 
room, where anybody apt, "in the spacious circuit of 
his musing," to wander among far-off things, may 
find so many memorable associations, and none of 
them more memorable than this. For most of five 
years and a half they sat — over one thousand sittings. 
On five days in the week they labored from nine in 
the morning until one or two in the afternoon. Each 
member received four shillings a day, and was fined 
sixpence if he was late for prayers at half-past eight. 
Not seldom they had a day of fasting, when they 
spent from nine to five very graciously. "After Dr. 
Twisse had begun with a brief prayer, Mr. Marshall 
prayed large two hours most divinely. After, Mr. 
Arrowsmith preached one hour, then a psalm, there- 
after Mr. Vines prayed near two hours, and Mr. Pal- 
mer preached one hour, and Mr. Seaman prayed near 
two hours, then a psalm. After Mr, Henderson 
brought them to a short, sweet conference of the heart 
confessed in the assembly, and other seen faults to be 
remedied, and the convenience to preach against all 
sects, especially Baptist and Antinomians." These 
prodigies of physical endurance in spiritual exercises 
were common in those days. Johnston of Warriston 
intending to spend an hour or two in prayer, once car- 
ried his devotions from six in the morning until 
he was amazed by the bells ringing at eight in the 
evening. 

There were learned scholars and theologians, but 
no governing churchman of the grand type rose up 
among them — nobody who at the same time compre- 
hended states and the foundation of states, explored 
creeds and the sources of creeds, knew man and the 



ISO OLIVER CROMWELL 

heart of man. No Calvin appeared, nor Knox, nor 
Wesley, nor Chalmers. Alexander Henderson was 
possessed of many gifts in argument, persuasion, 
counsel, but he had not the spirit of action and com- 
mand. Sincere Presbyterians of to-day turn impa- 
tiently aside from what they call the miserable logo- 
machies of the Westminster divines. Even in that 
unfruitful gymnastic, though they numbered pious 
and learned men, they had no athlete. They made 
no striking or original cofitribution to the strong and 
compacted doctrines of Calvinistic faith. To turn 
over the pages of Lightfoot's journal of their pro- 
ceedings is to understand what is meant by the de- 
scription of our seventeenth century as the middle ages 
of Protestantism. Just as mediaeval schoolmen dis- 
cussed the nature and existence of universals in one 
century, and the mysteries of immortality and a super- 
human First Cause in another century, so now divines 
and laymen discussed predestination, justification, 
election, reprobation, and the whole unfathomable 
body of the theological metaphysics by the same 
method — verbal logic drawing sterile conclusions from 
untested authority. 

Happily it is not our concern to follow the divines 
as they went plowing manfully through their Con- 
fession of faith. They were far from accepting the 
old proposition of Bishop Hall that the most useful 
of all books of theology would be one with the title 
of "De paucitate credendorum" of the fewness of the 
things that a man should believe. After long and 
tough debates about the decrees of election, they had 
duly passed the heads of Providence, Redemption. 
Covenant, Justification, Free Will, and a part of Per- 
severance. And so they proceeded. The two sides 
plied one another with arguments oral and on paper, 



THE WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY 151 

plea and replication, rejoinder and rebutter, surre- 
joinder and surrebutter. They contended, says hon- 
est Bailie, tanquam pro aris et facis — as if for hearth 
and altar. 

It was not until May (1647) ^^^^^ this famous 
exposition of theological truth was submitted to the 
House of Commons. By that time Parliament, in 
deep water, had other things to think of, and the 
Westminster Confession never received the sanction 
of the State. Nor did the two Catechisms, which, 
along with the Confession, are still the standards not 
only of the Church of Scotland, but of the great body 
of Presbyterian churches grouped all over the Eng- 
lish-speaking world, and numbering many millions of 
strenuous adherents. The effect of familiarity with 
the Shorter Catechism upon the intellectual character 
of the Scottish peasantry, and the connection between 
Presbyterian government and a strongly democratic 
turn of thought and feeling in the community, are 
accepted commonplaces. Perhaps this fruit of the 
labors of the Westminster Assembly, appraise it as 
we may, was in one sense the most lasting and positive 
product of the far-famed Long Parliament that set it 
up and controlled it. 



II 



A GREAT group of questions, one following another, 
arose upon the very threshold of the Reformation. 
The Pope dislodged, tradition cast forth, the open 
Bible placed in the emptied shrine, fresh fountains 
of spiritual truth and life unsealed of which all save 
the children of reprobation might partake — a long 
campaign of fierce battles was next fought on fields 
outside of purely theologic doctrine. What is the 



152 OLIVER CROMWELL 

scriptural form of church government — prelacy, pres- 
bytery, or congregational independence? Who was 
to inherit the authority of the courts spiritual — the 
civil magistrate or the purified and reconstituted 
church? Ought either bishop or synod to have coer- 
cive jurisdiction against the outward man, his liberty, 
life, or estate? Ought the state to impose one form 
of church government upon all citizens ; or to leave 
to free choice both form of government and submis- 
sion to discipline; or to favor one form, but without 
compulsion on individuals who favored another? 
Ought the state to proscribe or punish the practices 
of any church or adhesion to any faith? These were 
the mighty problems that had now first been brought 
to the front in England by(a^eat ^revolution, partly 
Ipolitical, partly ecclesiastical, and wholly unconscious. 
Hike most revolutions, of its own drift, issues, and 
l4;^esult> Few more determined struggles have ever 
been fought on our sacred national battle-ground at 
Westminster, than the contest between the Assembly 
of Divines and the Parliament. The divines inspired 
from Scotland insisted that presbytery was of divine 
right. The majority of the Parliament, true to Eng- 
lish traditions and instinct, insisted that all church 
government was of human institution and depended 
^ on the will of the magistrate. The divines contended 
that presbytery and synod were to have the unfet- 
tered right of inflicting spiritual censures, and deny- 
ing access to the communion-table to all whom they 
should choose to condemn as ignorant or scandalous 
persons. The Parliament was as stubborn that these 
censures were to be confined to offenses specified by 
law, and with a right of appeal to a lay tribunal. It 
was the mortal battle so incessantly renewed in that 
age and since, between the principles of Calvin and 



THE WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY 153 

Knox and the principles imputed to Erastiis. the 
Swiss physician and divine, who had died at Heidel- 
berg in 1583. 

For ten days at a time the assembly debated the 
right of every particular congregation to ordain its 
own officers. For thirty days they debated the propo- 
sition that particular congregations ought to be united 
under one Presbyterian government. In either case 
the test was Scripture; what had happened to Tim- 
othy or Titus ; how the Church of Antioch had stood 
to the first church at Jerusalem ; whether St. Paul had 
not written to the Philippians words that were a con- 
secration of presbytery. The Presbyterian majority 
besought the aid of a whole army of Dutch orthodox; 
they pressed for letters from France and from Geneva, 
which should contain grave and weighty admonitions 
to the assembly at Westminster, to be careful to sup- 
press all schismatics, and the mother and foster of 
all mischief, the independence of congregations. On 
the other hand the half-dozen Independents, whom 
Cromwell wished to strengthen by the addition of 
three divines of the right sort from New England, 
kept up a spirited resistance against the driving force 
of the orthodox current. A deliberative assembly 
tends to make party spirit obdurate. "Oh, what may 
not pride do!" cries Baxter; "and what miscarriages 
will not faction hide!" The Reconcilers, who called 
for unity in necessary things, liberty in things indiffer- 
ent, and charity in all things, could not be heard. 
The breach widened as time went on, and by 1645 ^^s 
repair was hopeless. The conflict in its progress 
made more definite the schism between Presbyterian 
and Independent. It was the alliance of Independent 
and Erastian in Parliament that finally baffled the 
Presbyterian after the Scottish model, and hardened 



154 OLIVER CROMWELL 

the great division, until what had been legitimate 
difference on a disputable question became mutual 
hatred between two infuriated factions. Baillie says 
of the Independents that it would be a marvel to him 
if such men should always prosper, their ways were 
so impious, unjust, ungrate, and every way hateful. 
One Coleman, an Erastian, gave good men much trou- 
ble by defending, with the aid of better lawyers than 
himself, the arguments of the Erastian doctor against 
the proposition that the founder of Christianity had 
instituted a church government distinct from the civil, 
to be exercised by the officers of the church without 
commission from the magistrates. Coleman was hap- 
pily stricken with death; he fell in an ague, and after 
four or five days he expired. "It is not good," runs 
the dour comment, "to stand in Christ's way." The 
divines were too shrewd not to perceive how it was 
the military weakness of the Scots that allowed the 
Independents with their heresies to ride rough-shod 
over them. If the Scots had only had fifteen thou- 
sand men in England, they said, their advice on doc- 
trine and discipline would have been followed quickly 
enough ; if the Scottish arms had only been successful 
last year, there would have been little abstract debat- 
ing. "It 's neither reason nor religion that stays some 
men's rage, but a strong army bridling them with 
fear." Such were the plain words of carnal wisdom. 
A story is told of a Scot and an Englishman disput- 
ing on the question of soldiers preaching. Quoth the 
Scot, "Is it fit that Colonel Cromv-^ell's soldiers should 
preach in their quarters, to take away the minister's 
function?" Quoth the Englishman, "Truly I remem- 
ber they made a gallant sermon at Marston Moor; 
that was one of the best sermons that hath been 
preached in the kingdom." The fortune of war, in 



THE WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY 155 

other words, carried with it the fortunes of theology 
and the churches. 

We need not follow the vicissitudes of party, or 
the changing shadows of military and political events 
as they fell across the zealous scene. One incident 
of the time must be noted. While presbytery had 
been fighting its victorious battle in the Jerusalem 
Chamber, the man whose bad steering had wrecked 
his church was sent to the block. The execution of 
Archbishop Laud (January 10, 1645) ^^ the best of 
all the illustrations of the hard temper of the time. 
Laud was more than seventy years old. He had been 
for nearly five years safe under lock and key in the 
Tower. His claws were effectually clipped, and it 
was certain that he would never again be able to do 
mischief, or if he were, that such mischief as he could 
do would be too trivial to be worth thinking of, in 
sight of such a general catastrophe as could alone 
make the old man's return to power possible. The 
execution of Strafford may be defended as a great 
act of retaliation or prevention, done with grave po- 
litical purpose. So, plausibly or otherwise, may the 
execution of King Charles. No such considerations 
justify the execution of Laud several years after he 
had committed the last of his imputed offenses and 
had been stripped of all power of ever committing 
more. It is not necessary that we should echo Dr. 
Johnson's lines about Rebellion's vengeful talons seiz- 
ing on Laud, while Art and Genius hovered weeping 
round his tomb; but if we rend the veil of romance 
from the Cavalier, we are bound not to be overdazzled 
by the halo of sanctity in the Roundhead. 

It was in 1646 that Parliament consummated wdiat 
would have seemed so extraordinary a revolution to 
the patriots of 1640 by the erection of the Presby- 



156 OLIVER CROMWELL 

terian system of Scotland, though with marked reser- 
vations of Parliamentary control, into the Established 
Church of England. The uniformity that had rooted 
itself in Scotland, and had been the center of the 
Solemn League and Covenant, was now nominally 
established throughout the island. But in name only. 
It was soon found in the case of church and state 
alike, that to make England break with her history is 
a thing more easily said than done, as it has ever been 
in all her ages. The Presbyterian system struck no 
abiding root. The Assembly, as a Scottish historian 
has pointedly observed, though called by an English 
Parliament, held on English ground, and composed 
of English divines, with only a few Scotsmen among 
them, still, as things turned out, existed and labored 
mainly for Scotland. 



Ill 



The deliberations of the divines were haunted 
throughout by the red specter of toleration. For the 
rulers of states a practical perplexity rose out of Prot- 
estantism. How was a system resting on the rights 
of individual conscience and private reason to be 
reconciled with either authority or unity? The natu- 
ral history of toleration seems simple, but it is in 
truth one of the most complex of all the topics that 
engage either the reasoner or the ruler ; and until 
nations were by their mental state ready for religious 
toleration, a statesman responsible for order naturally 
paused before committing himself to a system that 
might only mean that the members of rival commu- 
nions would fly at one another's throats, like Catholics 
and Huguenots in France, or Spaniards and Beggars 
in Holland. In history it is our business to try to 



THE WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY 157 

understand the possible reasons and motives for every- 
thing, even for intolerance. 

Religious toleration was no novelty either in great 
books or in the tractates of a day. Men of broad 
minds, like More in England and L'Hopital in France, 
had not lived for nothing; and though Bacon never 
made religious tolerance a political dogma, yet his 
exaltation of truth, knowledge, and wisdom tended to 
point that way. Nor should we forget that Crom- 
well's age is the age of Descartes and of Grotius, 
men whose lofty and spacious thinking, both directly 
and indirectly, contributed to create an atmosphere 
of freedom and of peace in which it is natural for 
tolerance to thrive. To say nothing of others, the 
irony of Montaigne in the generation before Crom- 
well was born had drawn the true moral from the 
bloodshed and confusion of the long fierce wars be- 
tween Catholic and Huguenot. Theories in books are 
wont to prosper or miscarry according to circum- 
stances, but beyond theory Presbyterians at West- 
minster might have seen both in France and in Hol- 
land rival professions standing side by side, each 
protected by the state. At one moment, in this very 
era, no fewer than five Protestants held the rank of 
marshals of France. The Edict of Nantes, indeed, 
while it makes such a figure in history (1598-1685), 
was much more of a forcible practical concordat than 
a plan reposing on anybody's acceptance of a deliber- 
ate doctrine of toleration. It was never accepted by 
the clergy, any more than it was in heart accepted by 
the people. Even while the edict was in full force, 
it was at the peril of his authority with his flock that 
either Catholic bishop or Protestant pastor in France 
preached moderation toward the other communion. 
It was not French example, but domestic necessities, 



158 OLIVER CROMWELL 

that here tardily brought toleration into men's minds. 
Helwys, Busher, Brown, sectaries whose names find 
no place in Hterary histories, had from the opening 
of the century argued the case for toleration, before 
the more powerful plea of Roger Williams; but the 
ideas and practices of Amsterdam and Leyden had 
perhaps a wider influence than either colonial exiles 
or homebred controversialists, in gradually producing 
a political school committed to freedom of conscience. 

The limit set to toleration in the earlier and un- 
clouded days of the Long Parliament had been fixed 
and definite. So far as Catholics were concerned, 
Charles stood for tolerance, and the Puritans for rig- 
orous enforcement of persecuting laws. In that great 
protest for freedom, the Grand Remonstrance itself, 
they had declared it to be far from their purpose or 
desire to let loose the golden reins of discipline and 
government in the church, to leave private persons or 
particular congregations to take up what form of 
divine service they pleased; "for we hold it requisite," 
they went on to say, "that there should be throughout 
the whole realm a conformity to that order which 
the laws enjoin according to the Word of God." It 
was the rise of the Independents to political power 
that made toleration a party question, and forced it 
into the salient and telling prominence that is reserved 
for party questions. 

The Presbyterian majority in principle answered 
the questions of toleration and uniformity, just as 
Laud or the Pope would have answered them — one 
church, one rule. The Catholic built upon St. Peter's 
rock; the Presbyterian built upon Scripture. Just as 
firmly as the Catholic, he believed in a complete and 
exclusive system, "and the existence of a single sepa- 
ratist congregation was at once a blot on its beauty 



THE WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY 159 

and a blow at its very basis" (Shaw). Liberty of 
conscience was in his eyes only liberty of error, and 
departure from uniformity only meant a hideous de- 
formity and multiformity of blaspheming sects. The 
Independent and the Baptist too were equally con- 
vinced of the scriptural source and the divine right 
of their own systems. It was political necessity that 
drove them reluctantly not only to work as partners 
with Erastian lawyers in Parliament, but to extend 
the theoretic basis of their own claim for toleration 
until it comprehended the whole swarm of Anabap- 
tists, Antinomians, Nullifidians, and the rest. Crom- 
well's toleration was different. It came easy to his 
natural temperament when practical convenience rec- 
ommended or demanded it. When he told Crawford 
early in the war that the state in choosing men to 
serve it takes no notice of their opinions, he struck 
the true note of toleration from the statesman's point 
of view. His was the practical temper which first 
asks about a thing how far it helps or hinders the 
doing of some other given thing, and the question 
now with him was whether tolerance would help or 
hinder union and force in military strength and the 
general objects of the war. 

A grander intellect than Cromwell's had entered 
the arena, for before the end of the year of Marston 
"Areopagitica" had appeared, the noble English classic 
of spiritual and speculative freedom. It was Milton's 
lofty genius that did the work of bringing a great 
universal idea into active relation with what all men 
could understand, and what all practical men wished 
for. There were others, indeed, who set the doctrine 
of toleration in a fuller light ; but in Milton's writings 
on church government he satisfies as well as Socinus, 
or Roger Williams, or any of his age, the test that has 



i6o OLIVER CROMWELL 

been imposed of making toleration "at once a moral, 
a political, and a theological dogma. With him the 
law of tolerance is no birth of scepticism or languor 
or indifference. It is no politician's argument for 
reconciling freedom of conscience with public order, 
nor is it a pungent intellectual demonstration like 
Bayle's, half a century later. Intolerance with Milton 
is dishonor to the victim, dishonor to the tyrant. 
The fountainhead from which every worthy enterprise 
issues forth is a pious and just honoring of ourselves; 
it is the sanctity and freedom of the man's own soul. 
On this austere self-esteem the scornful distinction 
between lay and cleric is an outrage. The coercive 
power of ecclesiastics is an impious intrusion into the 
inner sanctuary. Shame may enter, and remorse and 
reverence for good men may enter, and a dread of 
becoming a lost wanderer from the communion of the 
just and holy may enter, but never the boisterous and 
secular tyranny of an unlawful and unscriptural juris- 
diction. Milton's moving argument, at once so deli- 
cate and so haughty, for the rights and self-respecting 
obligations of "that inner man which may be termed 
the spirit of the soul," is the hidden mainspring of the 
revolt against formalism, against authority, and al- 
most against church organization in any of its forms. 
And it is the true base of toleration. Alas, even Mil- 
ton halts and stammers when he comes to ask him- 
self why, on the same arguments, popery may not 
plead for toleration. Here he can only fall back upon 
the regulation commonplaces. 

Milton's ideas, which were at the heart of Crom- 
well's vaguer and less firmly molded thinking, were 
in direct antagonism to at least three broad principles 
that hitherto ruled the minds of men. These ideas 
were fatal to uniformity of belief, not merely as a 



THE WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY i6i 

thing within reach, but as an object to be desired. 
They shattered and destroyed Authority, whether of 
clergy or laity, or of a king by the grace of God. 
Finally they dealt one of the blows that seem so 
naturally to mark the course of all modern revolu- 
tions to History as a moral power. For it is the 
essence of every appeal to reason or to the individual 
conscience to discard the heavy woven garments of 
tradition, custom, inheritance, prerogative, and an- 
cient institution. History becomes, in Milton's own 
exorbitant phrase, no more than the perverse iniquity 
of sixteen hundred years. Uniformity, authority, his- 
tory — to shake these was to move the foundations of 
the existing world in England. History, however, 
shows itself a standing force. It is not a dead, but a 
living hand. The sixteen hundred years that Milton 
found so perverse had knit fibers into our national 
growth that even Cromwell and all the stern zealotries 
of Puritanism were powerless to pluck out. 



IV 



Events made toleration in its full Miltonic breadth 
the shibboleth. In principle and theory it enlarged 
its way both in Parliament and the army, in associa- 
tion with the general ideas of political liberalism, and 
became a practical force. Every war tends to create 
a peace party, even if for no other cause, yet from the 
innate tendency of men to take sides. By the end of 
the year of Marston Moor political dififerences of 
opinion upon the terms of peace had become definitely 
associated with the ecclesiastical difference between 
Presbyterian and Independent. The Presbyterians 
were the peace men, and the Independents were for 



■^ 



1 62 OLIVER CROMWELL 

relentless war until the ends of war should be gained. 
Henceforth these are the two great party names, and 
of the Independents Cromwell's energy and his mili- 
tary success rapidly made him the most powerful 
figure. 

When it was that Cromwell embraced Independent 
views of church organization we cannot with pre- 
cision tell, nor does it matter. He deferred signing 
the Presbyterian Covenant as long as possible (Feb- 
ruary, 1644). He was against exclusion and pro- 
scription, but on grounds of policy, and from no 
reasoned attachment to the ideal of a free or congre- 
gational church. He had a kindness for zealots, be- 
cause zeal, enthusiasm, almost fanaticism, was in its 
best shape his own temper, and even in its worst 
shape promoted or protected his own policy. When 
his policy of war yet hung in the balance it was the 
Independents wdio by their action, views, and temper 
created his opportunity. By their fervor and sincerity 
they partially impressed him with their tenets, and 
opened his mind to a range of new ideas that lay 
beyond their own. Unhappily in practice, when the 
time came, Puritan toleration went little further than 
Anglican intolerance. 



CHAPTER IV 



THE NEW MODEL 



AFTER the victory at Marston, followed as it was 
by the surrender of York, men expected other 
decisive exploits from Lord Manchester and his tri- 
umphant army. He was directed to attend on the 
motions of the indomitable Rupert, in whom the dis- 
aster before the walls of York seemed to have stirred 
fresh energy. Manchester saw a lion in every path. 
The difficulties he made were not devoid of reason, 
but a nation in a crisis seeks a general whom difficul- 
ties confront only to be overcome. 

Essex meanwhile (September, 1644) had been over- 
taken by grievous disaster in the southwest. Escaping 
by sea from Plymouth, he left his army to find their 
way out by fighting or surrender as best they could. 
So great was his influence and popularity, than even in 
face of this miscarriage, Essex almost at once received 
a new command. Manchester was to cooperate with 
him in resisting the king's eastward march from Corn- 
wall to his fixed headquarters at Oxford. He pro- 
fesses to obey, but he loiters, delays, and finds excuses, 
until even the Derby House Committee lose patience 
and send a couple of their members to kindle a little 
fire in him, just as in the next century the French 

163 



i64 OLIVER CROMWELL 

Convention used to send two commissioners to spur 
on the revolutionary generals. "Destroy but the 
king's army," cried Waller, "and the work is ended." 
At length the forces of Essex, Waller, and Manches- 
ter combined, and attacked the king at Newbury. 
In this second battle of Newbury (October 27, 1644), 
though the Parliamentarians under Manchester and 
Waller were nearly two to one, the result was so little 
conclusive that the king made his way almost without 
pursuit from the field. He even returned within a 
fortnight, offered battle once more on the same 
ground, and as the challenge was declined returned at 
his ease to Oxford. 

At length vexation at inactivity and delay grew so 
strong that Cromwell (November 25), seizing the 
apt moment as was his wont, startled the House by 
opening articles of charge against his commander. 
Manchester, he said, ever since the victory of Marston 
Moor, had acted as if he deemed that to be enough ; 
had declined every opportunity of further advantage 
upon the enemy; and had lost occasion upon occasion, 
as if he thought the king too low and the Parliament 
too high. No man had ever less in him than Crom- 
well of the malcontent subordinate. "At this time," 
Waller says of him early in 1645, "^"^^ ^^^^^ never 
shown extraordinary parts, nor do I think he did 
himself believe that he had them; for although he was 
blunt, he did not bear himself with pride or disdain. 
As an officer he was obedient, and did never dispute 
my orders or argue upon them." His letters to Fair- 
fax at a later date are a pattern of the affectionate 
loyalty due from a man second in conmiand to a gen- 
eral whom he trusts. What alarmed him was not 
Manchester's backwardness in action, his aversion to 
engagement, his neglect of opportunities, but the 




From the original portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. 
SIR WILLIAM WALLER. 



THE NEW MODEL 165 

growing certainty that there was behind all this half- 
hearteclness some actual principle of downright un- 
willingness to prosecute the war to a full victory, and 
a deliberate design not to push the king too hard nor 
to reduce him too low. Cromwell recalled many ex- 
pressions of Manchester that plainly betrayed a desire 
not to end the war by the sword, but to make a peace 
on terms that were to his own taste. On one occa- 
sion the advocates of a fight urged that to let the king 
get off unassailed would strengthen his position at 
home and abroad, whereas if they only beat him now, 
he and his cause were forever ruined. Manchester 
vehemently urged the alternative risks. "If we beat 
the king ninety-nine times," he cried, "he will be king 
still and his posterity, and we subjects still ; but if he 
beat us but once, we shall be hanged and our posterity 
undone." "If that be so," said Cromwell, "why did 
we take up arms at first? This is against fighting 
ever hereafter. If so, let us make peace, let it be 
never so basely." 

Recriminations were abundant. The military ques- 
tion became a party question. It was loudly flung out 
that on one of the disputed occasions nobody was so 
much against fighting as Cromwell, and that after 
Newbury Cromwell, when ordered to bring up his 
horse, asked Manchester in a discontented manner 
whether he intended to flay the horse, for if he gave 
them more work he might have their skins, but he 
would have no service. He once made a speech very 
nearly quarter of an hour long against running the 
risk of an attack. While insinuating now that Man- 
chester had not acted on the advice of his councils of 
war, yet he had at the time loudly declared that any 
man was a villain and a liar who said any such thing. 
He was always attributing to himself all the praise 



1 66 OLIVER CROMWELL 

of other men's actions. Going deeper than such 
stories as these, were the reports of Cromwell's in- 
flammatory sayings ; as that he once declared to Lord 
Manchester his hatred of all peers, wishing there was 
never a lord in England, and that it would never be 
well till Lord Manchester was plain Mr. Montagu. 
Then he expressed himself with contempt of the West- 
minster divines, of whom he said that they were per- 
secutors of honester men than themselves. He de- 
sired to have none in the army but such as were of 
the Independent judgment, because these would with- 
stand any peace but such as honest men would aim 
at. He vowed that if he met the king in battle he 
would as lief fire his pistol at the king as at anybody 
else. Of their brethren the Scots he had used con- 
tumelious speech, and had even said that he would 
as cheerfully draw the sword upon them as upon any 
in the army of the king. 

The exasperation to which events had brought both 
the energetic men like Cromwell and the slower men 
like Essex had reached a dangerous pitch. One 
evening, very late, the two lawyers Whitelocke and 
Maynard were summoned to attend Lord Essex. 
They found the Scotch commissioners with him, along 
with Holies, Stapleton, and others of the Presbyterian 
party. The question was whether by English law 
Cromwell could be tried as an incendiary, as one who 
kindles coals of contention and raises differences in 
the state to the public damage. Of this move the 
Scots were the authors. "Cromwell is no good 
friend of ours," they said, "and ever since our army 
came into England he has used all underhand and 
cunning means to detract from our credit." He was 
no friend either to their church. Besides that, he was 
little of a well-wisher to the lord-general, whom they 



THE NEW MODEL 167 

had such good reason to love and honor. Was there 
law enough in England to clip his wings? 

The lawyers gave a sage reply. English law, they 
said, knows, but not very familiarly, the man who 
kindles the burning flames of contention. But were 
there proofs that Oliver was such an incendiary? It 
would never do for persons of so great honor and 
authority as Essex and the Scots to go upon ground 
of which they were not sure. Again, had they con- 
sidered the policy of the thing? "I take Lieutenant- 
General Cromwell," said Whitelocke, "to be a gentle- 
man of quick and subtle parts, and one who hath, 
especially of late, gained no small interest in the 
House of Commons; nor is he wanting of friends in 
the House of Peers, or of abilities in himself to man- 
age his own defense to the best advantage." The 
bitter Holies and his Presbyterian group were very 
keen for proceeding; they thought that there was 
plenty of evidence, and they did not believe Cromwell 
to be so strong in the Commons as was supposed. 
In the end it was the Scots who judiciously saved 
their English allies from falling into the scrape, and 
at two o'clock in the morning the party broke up. 
Whitelocke or another secretly told Cromwell what 
had passed, with the result that he only grew more 
eager than before. 



II 



A HUNDRED and thirty years later a civil war again 
broke out among the subjects of the British crown. 
The issues were not in form the same. Cromwell 
fought for the supremacy of Parliament within the 
kingdom; Washington fought against the supremacy 
of Parliament over Englishmen across the Atlantic 



1 68 OLIVER CROMWELL 

Ocean. It is possible that if Charles I had been as 
astute and as unscrupulous as George III the struggle 
on the English ground might have run a different 
course. However that may be, in each case the two 
wars were in their earlier stages not unlike, and both 
Marston Moor and Bunker Hill rank among those 
engagements that have a lasting significance in his- 
tory, where military results were secondary to moral 
effect. It was these encounters that first showed that 
the champions of the popular cause intended and were 
able to make a stand-up fight against the forces of 
the monarchy. In each case the combatants expected 
the conflict to be short. In each case the battle of 
popular liberty was first fought by weak bodies, ill- 
paid, ill-disposed to discipline, mounted on cart-horses, 
and armed with fowling-pieces, mainly anxious to get 
back to their homes as soon as they could, and fluc- 
tuating from month to month with the humors, the jeal- 
ousies, or the means of the separate counties in Eng- 
land, or the separate States in America. "Short 
enlistments," said Washington, "and a mistaken de- 
pendence on militia, have been the origin of all our 
misfortunes; the evils of a standing army are remote, 
but the consequence of wanting one is certain and 
inevitable ruin. To carry on the war systematically, 
you must establish your army on a permanent and 
national footing.'' What Washington said in 1776 
was just what Cromwell said in 1644. 

The system had broken down. Officers complained 
that their forces melted away, because men thought 
they would be better treated in other counties, and 
all comers were welcomed by every association. One 
general grumbles that another general is favored in 
money and supplies. The governors of strong towns 
are in hot feud with the committee of the town. 



THE NEW MODEL 169 

Furious passages took place between pressed men and 
the county committees. Want of pay made the men 
sulky and mutinous, and there were always "evil in- 
struments" ready to trade on such moods. 

The Committee of Both Kingdoms write to a col- 
onel commanding in the west in the year of Naseby, 
that they have received very great complaints from the 
country of the mtolerable miscarriage of his troopers ; 
already great disservice is done to the Parliament by 
the robbing, spoiling, and plundering of the people, 
they also giving extreme offense by their swearing, 
drinking, and all kinds of debaucheries. Exemplary 
punishment should be inflicted upon such notorious 
misdemeanants. The sufferings of some parts of the 
country were almost unbearable. The heavy exac- 
tions of the Scots in Cumberland and Westmoreland 
for month after month brought the inhabitants of 
those counties to despair, "and necessity forced the 
distressed people in some parts to stand upon their 
defense against the taxings and doings of the sol- 
diers." In Northumberland and Durham the charges 
on the farmers were so heavy that the landlord had 
little or nothing, and was only too glad if his tenants 
could but keep a fire in the farm-houses and save them 
from ruin. The Yorkshire men complained that they 
were rated in many districts for the Scottish horse at 
more than double the value of their lands in the best 
times. On each side at this time the soldiers lived in 
the main upon plunder. They carried off cattle and 
cut down crops. They sequestered rents and assessed 
fines. They kept up a multitude of small forts and 
garrisons as a shelter to flying bands, who despoiled 
the country and fought off enemies who would fain 
have done the same, and could have done no worse. 

Apart from the squalor and brutality intrinsic in 



I70 OLIVER CROMWELL 

war, the general breakdown of economic order might 
well alarm the instincts of the statesman. "Honest 
industry," cried one voice of woe, "is quite discour- 
aged, being almost useless. Most men that have es- 
tates are betrayed by one side or another, plundered, 
sequestered. Trading — the life and substance of 
thousands — decaying, eaten up with taxes ; your poor 
quite ready to famish, or to rise to pull relief from 
rich men's hands by violence. Squeezed by taxes, 
racked by war, the anvil, indeed, of misery, upon 
which all the strokes of vengeance fell." A covetous 
eye had long been cast upon the endowments of the 
church. "The stop of trade here," Baillie wrote even 
so far back as 1641, "has made this people much 
poorer than ordinary ; they will noways be able to 
bear their burden if the cathedrals fall not." From 
its first phases in all countries the Reformation of 
faith went with designs upon the church lands. And 
so it was in England now. 

"You will never get your service done," said Wal- 
ler, "until you have an army entirely your own, and 
at your own command." This theme was the prime 
element in the New Model — the substitution of one 
army under a single commander-in-chief, supported by 
the Parliament, instead of sectional armies locally 
levied and locally paid. The second feature was the 
weeding out of worthless men, a process stigmatized 
by Presbyterians out of temper as a crafty means of 
filling the army with Sectaries, a vile compound of 
Jew, Christian, and Turk, mere tools of usurping am- 
bition. The third was the change in the command. 
The new army was entrusted to Sir Thomas Fairfax 
as commander-in-chief, with liberty to name his own 
officers subject to ratification by the two Houses. The 
honest Skippon, a valiant fighter and a faithful man, 



THE NEW MODEL 171 

was made major-general, and the higher post of lieu- 
tenant-general was left significantly open. It is curi- 
ous to find that the army was reduced in numbers. 
The army of which Essex was lord-general numbered 
twenty-five thousand foot and five thousand horse. 
The army of the New Model was to consist only of 
twenty-two thousand men in all, fourteen thousand 
four hundred being foot and the rest horse and dra- 
goons. A trooper received about as much as he would 
have got for labor at the plow or with the wagon. 

The average substantive wealth in the army was 
not high. Royalists were fond of taunting them with 
their meager means, and vowed that the whole pack 
of them from the lord-general to the horse-farrier 
could not muster one thousand pounds a year in land 
among them. Yet in Fairfax's new army, of the offi- 
cers of the higher military rank no fewer than thirty 
out of thirty-seven were men of good family. Pride 
the drayman, and Hewson the cobbler, and Okey the 
ship-chandler, were among the minority who rose 
from the common ranks. When Cromwell spoke to 
Hampden about an army of decayed serving-men and 
tapsters, his own men had never been of the tapster 
tribe. They were most of them freeholders and free- 
holders' sons, who upon matter of conscience engaged 
in the quarrel, and ''thus being well armed within by 
the satisfaction of their own consciences, and without 
by good iron arms, they would as one man stand 
firmly and charge despeately." 

That was the ideal of the New Model. We can- 
not, however, assume that it was easy or possible to 
procure twenty thousand men of militant conscience, 
willing for the cause to leave farm and shop, wife 
and home, to submit themselves to iron discipline, 
and to face all the peril of battle, murder, and sudden 



172 OLIVER CROMWELL 

death. Even if Cromweirs ideal was the prevailing 
type, it has been justly pointed out that constant pay 
must have been a taking inducement to volunteers in 
a time when social disorder had made work scarce. 
If we remember, again, that a considerable portion of 
the new army were not even volunteers, but had been 
impressed against their will, the influence of Puritan 
zeal can hardly have been universal, even if it were 
so much as general. 

Baxter had good opportunity of knowing the army 
well, though he did not see with impartial eyes, and 
he found abundance of the common troopers to be 
honest, sober, and right-thinking men, many of them 
tractable, ready to hear the truth, and of upright in- 
tentions. But the highest places he found filled by 
proud, self-conceited, hot-headed Sectaries, Cromwell's 
chief favorites. Then, in a sentence, he unwittingly 
discloses why Cromwell favored them. "By their 
very heat and activity," he says, "they bore down the 
rest and carried them along; these were the soul of 
the army, though they did not number one to twenty 
in it." In other words, what Baxter says comes to 
this, that they had the quality of fire and resolution; 
and fire and resolution are what every leader in a 
revolutionary crisis values more than all else, even 
though his own enthusiasm in the common cause 
springs from other fountains of belief or runs in other 
channels. Anabaptists, Brownists, Familists, and the 
rest of the many curious swarms from the Puritan 
hive, none of them repelled Oliver, because he knew 
that the fanatic and the zealot, for all their absurdi- 
ties, had the root of the matter in him. 

There were several steps in the process of military 
transformation. In December the Commons, acting 






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lit 





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Drawn by George T Tobin after a portrait by Van Dyck (ascribed also to William Dobson), 
by permission of the Countess of Warwick. 

JAMES GRAHAM, FIFTH EARL AND FIRST MARQUIS OF jrONTROSE. 



THE NEW MODEL 173 

upon Cromwell's argument from the suspicion with 
which people looked upon Lords and Commoners in 
places of high command, passed the famous ordinance 
by which no member of either House should have 
any office of civil or military command. In January 
the handful who now composed the House of Lords 
threw out the ordinance. A second ordinance was 
sent up to them in February, and they passed it with 
amendments. In the middle of February (1645) ^^^^ 
New Model ordinance was finally passed. Six weeks 
later the Self-denying Ordinance was brought back 
in a revised form, only enacting that within forty 
days members of either of the two Houses should re- 
sign any post that the Parliament had intrusted to 
them. Essex, Manchester, Denbigh, Warwick, Wal- 
ler, resigned without waiting for the forty days. It 
must have been an anxious moment, for Essex was 
still popular w^ith the great body of the army, and if 
he had chosen to defy the ordinance he might possibly 
have found support both in public opinion and in mili- 
tary force. "But he w'as not for such enterprises," 
says Clarendon, with caustic touch. Honorable and 
unselfish men have not been so common in the history 
of states and armies, that we need approve the 
sarcasm. 

Cromwell followed a line that was peculiar, but 
might easily have been foretold. The historian in 
our own day tells us that he finds it hard to avoid 
the conclusion that Cromw^ell was ready to sacrifice 
his own unique position in the army, and to retire 
from military service. This is surely not easy to be- 
lieve, any more than it is easy to believe another story 
for which the evidence comes to extremely little, that 
at another time he meant to take service in Germany. 



174 OLIVER CROMWELL 

It is true that in inspiring and supporting the first 
version of the Self-denying Ordinance, Oliver seemed 
to be closing the chapter of his own labors in the field. 
Yet nobody can deny that his proceedings were ob- 
lique. It is incredible that the post of lieutenant-gen- 
eral should have been left vacant, otherwise than by 
design. It is incredible that even those who were 
most anxious to pull Cromwell down should not have 
foreseen that if the war was to go on. the most suc- 
cessful and popular of all their generals would inev- 
itably be recalled. In Cromwell it would have been 
an incredibly foolish underestimate of himself to sup- 
pose that his own influence, his fierce energ\', his de- 
termination, and his natural gift of the militan,- eye, 
could all be spared at an hour when the struggle was 
drawing to its most hazardous stage. 

What happened actually was this. The second Self- 
denying Ordinance was passed on April 3d. and Crom- 
well was bound to lay down all militar}' command 
within forty days. Meanwhile he was despatched to- 
ward the west. The end of the forty days found him in 
the Oxford countr}-. The Parliament passed a special 
ordinance, not without misgivings in the Lords, ex- 
tending his emplo}Tnent for fort\- days more until 
June 22d. Before the expin.- of this new term, Fair- 
fax and the oflicers. following the Common Council 
who had demanded it before, petitioned the Houses 
to sanction the appointment of Cromwell to the vacant 
post of lieutenant-general with command of the horse. 
The Commons agreed (June 10). and Fairfax for- 
mally appointed him. At the moment. Cromwell had 
been sent from Oxford CMay 26) into the eastern 
counties to protect the Isle of Ely. He was taken 
by legal fiction or in fact to have complied with the 



THE NEW MODEL 175 

Self-denying Ordinance by resigning, and strictly 
speaking his appointment required the assent of both 
Houses. But the needs of the time were too sharp 
for ceremony. The campaign had now begun that 
almost in a few hours was to end in the ever-famous 
day of Naseby. 



CHAPTER V 



THE DAY OF NASEBY 



ARMED Puritanism was now first to manifest all its 
ir\. strength. Faith that the God of Battles was on 
their side nerved its chosen and winnowed ranks with 
stern confidence. The fierce spirit of the Old Tes- 
tament glowed like fire in their hearts. But neither 
these moral elements of military force, nor discipline, 
technical precision, and iron endurance would have 
sufficed to win the triumph at Naseby without the in- 
trepid genius of Oliver. This was the day on which 
the great soldier was first to show himself in modern 
phrase a Man of Destiny. 

The first movements of the campaign of 1645, 
which was to end in the destruction of the king's arms, 
were confused and unimportant. The Committee of 
Both Kingdoms hardly knew what to do with the new 
weapon now at their command, and for many weeks 
both Fairfax and Cromwell were employed in carrying 
out ill-conceived orders in the west. In May Charles 
left his headquarters at Oxford, with a design of 
marching through the midlands northward. On the 
last day of the month he took Leicester by storm. The 
committee at Westminster were filled with alarm. 
Was it possible that he intended an invasion of their 

176 



THE DAY OF NASEBY 177 

stronghold in the eastern counties ? Fairfax, who lay 
before the walls of Oxford, was immediately directed 
to raise the siege and follow the king. 

The modern soldier is struck all through the war 
with the ignorance on both sides of the movements, 
plans, and position of the enemy. By June 13th the 
two armies were in Northamptonshire, only some 
seven miles apart, Fairfax at Guilsborough, Charles at 
Daventry ; and yet it was not until the Parliamentary 
scouts were within sight of the Royalist camp that 
the advance of Fairfax became known. The Royalists 
undoubtedly made a fatal mistake in placing them- 
selves in the way of Fairfax after they had let Goring 
go ; and the cause of their mistake was the hearty con- 
tempt entertained by the whole of them from king to 
drummer for the raw army and its clownish recruits. 
The cavaliers had amused themselves, we are told, by 
cutting a wooden image in the shape of a man, and "in 
such a form as they blasphemously called it the god of 
the Roundheads, and this they carried in scorn and 
contempt of our army in a public manner a little before 
the battle began." So confident were they of teach- 
ing the rabble a lesson. Doubting friends thought as 
ill of the New Model as overweening foes. "Their 
new-modeled army," says Baillie, like all the Presby- 
terians at this moment, hardly knowing what he ought 
to wish, "consists for the most part of raw, unexperi- 
enced, pressed soldiers. Few of the officers are 
thought capable of their places ; many of them are 
Sectaries ; if they do great service, many will be 
deceived." 

Disaster, however, was not to be. Cromwell, as we 
have seen, had been ordered off eastward, to take mea- 
sures for the defense of the Isle of Ely. These com- 
mands, says a contemporary, "he, in greater tenderness 



178 OLIVER CROMWELL 

of the public service than of his own honor, in such a 
time of extremity disputed not but fulfilled." After 
securing Ely, he applied himself to active recruiting 
in Cambridgeshire with the extraordinary success 
that always followed his inspiring energy. As soon as 
the king's movements began to create uneasiness, Fair- 
fax, knowing Cromwell's value as commander of horse, 
applied in haste to the Parliament that he should be spe- 
cially permitted to serve as lieutenant-general. The 
Houses after some demur gave him plenary leave ac- 
cordingly. The general despatched constant expresses 
to Cromwell himself, to inform him from time to time 
where the army was, so that he might know in case of 
danger where to join them. When he found battle to 
be imminent, Oliver hastened over the county border 
as hard as he and six hundred horsemen with him 
could ride. They rode into Fairfax's quarters at six 
o'clock on the morning of June 13th, and were hailed 
with the liveliest demonstrations of joy by the general 
and his army. "For it had been observed," says an 
onlooker of those days, "that God was with him, and 
that affairs were blessed under his hand." He was 
immediately ordered to take command of the marshal- 
ing of the horse. There was not an instant to lose, 
for before the field-officers could even give a rough 
account of the arrangements of the army, the enemy 
came on amain in excellent order, while the plan of the 
Parliamentary commanders was still an embryo. This 
was the moment that Cromwell has himself in glow- 
ing phrase described : "I can say this of Naseby, that 
when I saw the enemy draw up and march in gallant 
order toward us, and we a company of poor ignorant 
men, to seek how to order our battle — the general hav- 
ing commanded me to order all the horse — I could not, 
riding alone about my business, but smile out to God 



THE DAY OF NASEBY 179 

in praises, in assurance of victory, because God would 
by things that are not bring to aught things that 
are." 

The number of men engaged, Hke the manoeuvers 
that preceded the battle, is a matter of much uncer- 
tainty. One good contemporary authority puts the 
Parliamentary forces at eleven thousand, and says that 
the two armies were about equal. Mr. Gardiner, on 
the other hand, believes the Parliamentarians to have 
been thirteen thousand six hundred, and the Royalists 
only seven thousand five hundred, or not much more 
than one to two — a figure that is extremely hard to 
reconcile with two admitted facts. One is that nobody 
puts the number of Royalist prisoners lower than four 
thousand (and one contemporary even makes them six 
thousand), while the slain are supposed to have been 
not less than one thousand. This would mean the 
extinction by death or capture of two thirds of the 
king's total force, and no contemporary makes the dis- 
aster so murderous as this. The admission again that 
the Royalist cavalry after the battle was practically 
intact, increases the difficulty of accepting so low an 
estimate for the total of the king's troops, for nobody 
puts the Royalist horse under four thousand. The 
better opinion undoubtedly seems to be that, though 
Fairfax's troops outnumbered the king's, yet the su- 
periority can hardly have approached the proportion of 
two to one. 

The country was open, and the only fences were 
mere double hedges with an open grass track between 
them, separating Naseby from Sulby on the west and 
Clipston on the east. On the right of Fairfax's line, 
where Cromwell and his troopers were posted, the 
action of cavalry was much hindered by rabbit bur- 
rows, and at the bottom there was boggy land equally 



i8o OLIVER CROMWELL 

inconvenient to the liorsemen of the king. The level 
of the ParHamentary position was some fifty feet, that 
of the RoyaHst position not more than thirty, above the 
open hollow between them. The slope was from three 
to four degrees, thus offering little difficulty of incline 
to either horse or foot. 

If the preliminary manceuvers cannot be definitely 
made out in detail, nor carried beyond a choice of alter- 
native hypotheses each as good as the other, the actual 
battle is as plain as any battle on rather meager and 
fragmentary reports can be considered plain. As 
usual on both sides, the infantry were posted in the 
center, with the cavalry on either flank. Fairfax 
seems to have taken up his ground on the ledge of the 
hill running from east to west. Then possibly at 
Cromwell's suggestion he drew his men back a hun- 
dred paces from the ledge, so as to keep out of the 
enemy's sight, knowing that he could recover the ad- 
vantage when he pleased. Such, so far as can be made 
out from very entangled evidence, is the simplest view 
of Fairfax's position. Cromwell, in command of the 
horse, was stationed on the Parliamentary right, and 
Ireton on the left. The veteran Skippon commanded 
regiments of foot in the center. On the opposite slope 
across Broadmoor Rupert faced Ireton, and Sir Mar- 
maduke Langdak, with his northern horse in the 
doubtful humor of men who wished to go homeward, 
faced Cromwell, while Lord Astley led the infantry in 
the center. Fairfax directed the disposition of his 
men, and was conspicuous during the three hours of 
the engagement by his energy, vigilance, and persis- 
tence. He was by constitution a slow-footed man, but 
when he drew near action in the field then another 
spirit came upon him, men said, and another soul 
looked out of his eyes. King Charles, though infe- 




From a print in the British Museum. 
SIR JACOB ASTLEY, AFTERWARD LORD ASTLEV. 



THE DAY OF NASEBY i8i 

rior in military capacity, was not behind him in either 
activity or courage. 

The word was on the one side "Mary," the king's 
favorite name for the queen; on the other side, ''God 
with us." The Royalists opening the attack advanced 
their whole line a hundred yards or so across the flat 
and up the slope toward the opposite ridge. The Parlia- 
mentarians came into view upon the brow from which 
they had recently retired. In a few moments the foot 
in the center were locked in stubborn conflict. They 
discharged their pieces, and then fell to it with clubbed 
muskets and with swords. The Royalist infantry 
pressed Skippon so hard that his first line at last gave 
way and fell back on the reserve. Ireton, with his 
horse on the Parliamentary left, launched one of his 
divisions to help the foot on his right, but with little 
advantage to them and with disaster to himself. For 
Rupert, dashing through the smart musketry fire from 
Okey's dragoons posted behind Sulby hedges, came 
crashing with irresistible weight upon the other por- 
tion of Ireton's horse on the western slope of the ridge, 
broke them up, and pursued the scattered force toward 
Naseby village. On the right meanwhile things had 
gone better, for here Cromwell stood. He had de- 
tailed a force of his cavalry under Whalley to meet 
Langdale in front with the Royalist left v/ing, and 
he himself swept round on to Langdale's left flank 
with the main body of his own horse. Whalley thun- 
dering down the slope caught the left of the opposing 
horse with terrific impetus, before the enemy could 
charge up the higher ground. Nothing could stand 
against him. Oliver's charge on the other flank com- 
pleted Langdale's ruin, some of the enemy dashing in 
headlong flight from the field, others finding their way 
to the king's reserve, and there halting huddled to- 



1 82 OLIVER CROMWELL 

gether until they were by-and-by re-formed. They 
were mainly from Yorkshire and the north, and had 
gone into battle with half a heart. Such was Crom- 
well's first onset. 

The main battle was less victorious. The right of 
the Parliamentary foot stood firm, but the rest being 
overpressed gave ground and fell back in disorder. 
The officers made fruitless attempts to check the con- 
fusion of their inexperienced forces, and were obliged 
to fall into the reserves with their colors, "choosing 
rather to fight and die than to quit the ground they 
stood on." It was at this point that Cromwell exe- 
cuted his second movement; it was the crisis of the 
battle. With singular exactness he repeated the tac- 
tics that had won the memorable day at Marston. 
There as here — Cromwell's wing victorious, the other 
wing worsted, the foot in the center hard pressed, 
Cromwell re-forming to the rescue. Rupert, like Gor- 
ing's men at Marston, instead of leaving a detachment 
to pursue Ireton's fugitive horse, and turning to help 
the king's infantry in their work at the center, lost time 
and a decisive opportunity. Cromwell, as at Marston, 
observing the difficulties of the Parliamentary foot, 
collected his whole force, save one regiment detailed to 
watch or pursue the flight of Langdale's horsemen, 
formed them again in line, set a new front toward the 
left flank of the enemy's foot, and flung them with up- 
lifted right arms and flashing swords to the relief of 
the hotly pressed infantry of Fairfax and Skippon. 
One of the Royalist brigades offered an obstinate re- 
sistance. "The Parliamentarians strove hard to break 
them, but even the Ironsides could not drive them in, 
they standing with incredible courage and resolution, 
though we attempted them in flank, front, and rear." 
No impression was made until Fairfax called up his 



THE DAY OF NASEBY 183 

own regiment of foot. Then the stubborn brigade of 
RoyaHsts gave way, and in a short time there was little 
left in the whole of the field but the remnant of the 
king's horse. Though some, says the modern soldier, 
may hold Marston to offer a greater variety of striking 
pictures and moments of more intensity (Hoenig, i. 
203), there is scarcely a battle in history where cavalry 
was better handled than at Naseby. In the tactics of 
Naseby this second charge of the Cromwellian horse 
stands out conspicuous for skill and vigor. 

There was still, however, one more move to make 
before victory was secure. Though aware of the dis- 
aster that was overwhelming him, the king strove 
bravely to rally the broken horse of his left wing. He 
was joined by Rupert, at last returning from the bag- 
gage-wagons and Naseby village, with his men and 
horses exhausted and out of breath. Here the Royal- 
ists made their last stand. It was in vain. The Par- 
liamentary generals, with extraordinary alacrity, pre- 
pared for a final charge, and their preparation was 
hardly made before all was over and the day won. 
Ireton, though severely wounded in the beginning of 
the battle, had got his men together again, and he took 
an active part in the new attack. The Parliamentary 
foot, who had been thrown into disorder by the first 
charge, and had then rallied "in a shorter time 
than imaginable," now advanced at the top of their 
speed to join the horse. For Oliver had got his force 
of cavalry once more in hand, and made ready to bear 
down on the enemy for a third and final charge. The 
horsemen were again drawn up in two wings within 
carbine-shot of the enemy, "leaving a wide space be- 
tween the wings for the battle of the foot to fall in. 
Thereby," says the eye-witness, "there was framed, as 
it were in a trice, a second good battalia at the latter 



1 84 OLIVER CROMWELL 

end of the day, which the enemy perceiving, and that 
if they stood they must expect a second charge from our 
horse, foot, and artillery (they having lost all their 
foot and guns before), and our dragoons having 
already begun to fire upon their horse, they not willing 
to abide a second shock upon so great disadvantage as 
there was like to be, immediately ran away, both fronts 
and reserves, without standing one stroke more." To 
the king, gallantly heading his line, a curious and char- 
acteristic thing happened. Lord Carnwath riding by 
his side suddenly laid his hand upon the king's bridle, 
and swearing sundry Scotch oaths, cried out, "Will 
you go upon your death in an instant?" "Then," says 
Clarendon, "before the king understood what he would 
have, he turned his horse round, and upon that they 
all turned their horses and rode upon the spur, as if 
they were every man to shift for himself." 

The fight, which was desperately maintained at 
every point throughout the day, with its issue often 
doubtful, lasted three hours. The killed and wounded 
were about five thousand. The Irish camp-followers 
were slaughtered in cold blood. All the king's guns, 
all his wagons and carriages, his colors and standards 
were taken, and, worst of all, his private cabinet, con- 
taining his most secret correspondence and papers. 
This did him an injury almost as deep as the loss of a 
battle, for the letters disclosed his truthlessness, and 
the impossibility of ever trusting him. A weird and 
vivid picture of the latest scenes of Naseby survives in 
the story of Lady Herbert. She went with a retainer 
to seek the body of her husband. It was a chill and 
boisterous night. They met stragglers laden with 
spoil ; and here and there lay a miserable wounded man 
imploring help which they could not give. The living 
array and throng of war had passed, and nothing re- 




From the original portrait by Van Dyck at Hinchinbrook, 
by permission of the Earl of Sandwich. 

PRINCE RUPERT. 



THE DAY OF NASEBY 185 

mained but the still and motionless heaps of dead and 
dying. The moon sometimes gave a prospect over the 
encumbered field. Here the slain were piled closely 
together, there they had fallen dispersed in broken 
flight. Mangled limbs were scattered about, mixed 
with the carcases of horses, gun-carriages, and broken 
tumbrils. Elsewhere were small arms and fragments 
of feathers and clothing. The spoilers of the dead 
had now newly done their work ; but one or two strag- 
gling women still moved up and down like specters 
among the heaps of slaughter. 

She made up to one of the women, and asked if she 
could tell where the King's Guards had fought. "Ay, 
gossip. Be'st thou come a-rifling too? But i'faith 
thou'rt of the latest. The swashing gallants were as 
fine as peacocks ; but we've stript their bravery, I trow. 
Yonder stood the King's tent, and yonder about do 
most of them lie; but thou'lt scarce find a lading for 
thy cattle now." She went by this direction toward 
a rising ground, where the fragments of the royal tent 
were still to be seen. The dead here lay wedged in close 
heaps, indicating that the conflict had been long and 
desperate. The combatants had often fallen in mor- 
tal struggle, grasped together in the very attitude in 
which the}^ had given the death wounds. Such is hate- 
ful war. 

Toward the end of May, Digby writes in one of 
his letters, "Ere one month be over, we shall have 
a battle of all for all." The prediction came true. 
If the battle had gone the other way Goring and the 
king would have marched up to London, heartening 
their men with the promise of the spoil of the richest 
city in the realm, and the presence of the king and 
his army in the metropolis might have created a situ- 
ation that nothing could retrieve. Even now the 



1 86 OLIVER CROMWELL 

king had not lost his crown. Time had still golden 
opportunities to offer him. Yet Naseby was one of 
the decisive battles of English history. It destroyed 
the last organized force that Charles was able to 
raise; it demonstrated that the New Model had pro- 
duced an invincible army; it transformed the nature 
of the struggle, and the conditions of the case; it 
released new interests and new passions; it changed 
the balance of parties; and it brought Cromwell into 
decisive preeminence in all men's minds. 



II 



Cromwell's own account of Naseby is the tersest 
bulletin on record, but he takes care to draw a political 
moral for the hot party struggle then going on at 
Westminster. "Honest men," he writes to the 
Speaker, "served you faithfully in this action. Sir, 
they are trusty; I beseech you, in the name of God, 
not to discourage them. I wish their actions may 
beget thankfulness and humility in all that are con- 
cerned in it. He that ventures his life for the liberty 
of his country, I wish he trust God for the liberty of 
his conscience, and you for the liberty he fights for." 
In plainer words, the House of Commons should not 
forget how much the Independents had to do with 
the victory, and that what the Independents fought 
for was above all else liberty of conscience. 

For the king the darkness was lightened by a 
treacherous ray of hope from Scotland. The Scots, 
whose aid had been of such decisive value to the Par- 
liament at the end of 1643, oi"i the stricken field at 
Marston in the summer of 1644, and in the seizure 
of Newcastle three months later, had been since of 



THE DAY OF NASEBY 187 

little use. At Naseby they had no part nor lot, and 
they even looked on that memorable day with a surly 
eye; although it had indeed broken the malignants, 
it had mightily exalted the Independents. A force of 
Scots still remained on English ground, but they were 
speedily \vanted in their own country. One of the 
fiercest of the lesser episodes of the war happened in 
Scotland, where in the northern Highlands and else- 
where the same feeling for the national line of their 
princes came into life among chieftains and clans- 
men that survived with so many romantic circum- 
stances and rash adventures down to the rebellion 
of 1745. 

In August, 1644, Montrose, disguised as a groom 
and accompanied by two of his friends, rode across 
the southwestern border from Carlisle and made his 
way to Athole. There he was joined by a mixed con- 
tingent of Highlanders and twelve hundred Irish, 
lately brought over under Highland leadership into 
Argyllshire. This was the beginning of a flame of 
royal ism that blazed high for a year, was marked by 
much savagery and destruction, left three or four new 
names upon the historic scroll of the bloody scufiles 
between Campbells, Forbeses, Erasers, Macleans, Mac- 
donalds, Gordons, Ogilvies, Grahams, and the rest, 
and then finally died down at the battle of Philip- 
haugh. Montrose reached the top of his success at 
the engagement of Kilsyth, just two months after 
Naseby. In another month the rushing meteor went 
out. David Leslie, who fought at Cromwell's side 
at Marston Moor and was now on duty in England, 
took his force up to the border, crossed the Tweed, 
found Montrose and his ragged and scanty force of 
clansmen encamped at Philiphaugh, near Selkirk 
(September 13, 1645), ^^^d there fell suddenly upon 



1 88 OLIVER CROMWELL 

them, shattering into empty air both Montrose's fan- 
tasies and the shadowy hopes of the dreaming king. 

Charles's resohition was still unshaken. As he told 
Digby, if he conld not live like a king, he would die 
like a gentleman. Six weeks after the fatal battle 
he writes to Prince Rupert : "I confess that, speaking 
either as a mere soldier or statesman, I must say that 
there is no probability but of my ruin. But as a 
Christian 1 must tell you that God will not suffer 
rebels and traitors to prosper, or this cause to be over- 
thrown. And whatever personal punishment it shall 
please him to inflict upon me must not make me repine, 
much less to give over this quarrel. Indeed, I can- 
not flatter myself with expectations of good success 
more than this, to end my days with honor and a good 
conscience, which obliges me to continue my endeav- 
ors, as not despairing that God may in due time 
avenge his own cause. Though I must avow to all 
my friends that he that will stay with me at this time 
must expect and resolve either to die for a good cause, 
or (which is worse) to live as miserable in maintain- 
ing it as the violence of insulting rebels can make it." 

This patient stoicism, which may attract us when 
we read about it in a book, was little to the mind of 
the shrewd soldier to whom the king's firm words were 
written. Rupert knew that the cause was lost, and 
counseled an attempt to come to terms. A disaster 
only second to Naseby and still more unforeseen soon 
followed. After a series of victorious operations in 
the west, at Langport, Bridgewater, Bath, Sherborne, 
Fairfax and Cromwell laid siege to Bristol, and after 
a fierce and daring storm (September loth) Rupert, 
who had promised the king that he could hold out 
for four good months, suddenly capitulated and rode 
away to Oxford under the humiliating protection of 




Drawn by George T. Tobin after a print In the British Museum of the portrait by Peter Oliver. 
JOHN PAWLET, MARQUIS OF WINCHESTER. 



THE DAY OF NASEBY 189 

a Parliamentary convoy. The fall of this famous 
stronghold of the west was the severest of all the 
king's mortifications, as the failure of Rupert's wonted 
courage was the strangest of military surprises. That 
Rupert was too clear-sighted not to be thoroughly 
discouraged by the desperate aspect of the king's 
affairs is certain, and the military difficulties of sus- 
taining a long siege were thought, even by those who 
had no reasons to be tender of his fame, to justify 
the surrender. The king would listen to no excuses, 
but wrote Rupert an angry letter, declaring so mean 
an action to be the greatest trial of his constancy that 
had yet happened, depriving him of his commissions, 
and bidding him begone beyond the seas. Rupert 
nevertheless insisted on following the king to Newark, 
and after some debate was declared to be free of all 
disloyalty or treason, but not of indiscretion. An- 
other quarrel arose between the king and his nephews 
and their partizans. The feuds and rivalries of Par- 
liament, at their worst, were always matched by the 
more ignoble distractions and jealousies of the court. 
Suspicions even grew up that Rupert and Maurice 
were in a plot for the transfer of the crown to their 
elder brother, the Elector Palatine. That the Elec- 
tor had been encouraged in such aspirations by earlier 
incidents was true. 

Cromwell improved the fall of Bristol as he had 
improved Naseby. "Faith and prayer," he tells the 
Speaker, "obtained this city for you. It is meet that 
God have all the praise. Presbyterians, Independents, 
and all here have the same spirit of faith and prayer, 
the same presence and answer; they agree here, have 
no names of difference; pity it is it should be other- 
wise anywhere." So he urges to the end of his de- 
spatch. Toleration is the only key-word. "All that 



ipo OLIVER CROMWELL 

believe have the real unity, which is most glorious 
because inward and spiritual. As for unity in forms, 
commonly called uniformity, every Christian will 
study that. But in things of the mind we look for 
no compulsion but that of light and reason. In other 
things God hath put the sword in the hands of the 
Parliament for the terror of evildoers and the praise 
of them that do well." These high refrains were not 
at all to the taste of the Presbyterian majority, and 
on at least one occasion they were for public purposes 
suppressed. 

After Bristol Winchester fell. Then Cromwell sat 
down before Basing House, which had plagued and 
defied the generals of the Parliament for many long 
months since 1643. Its valorous defender was Lord 
Winchester, a Catholic, a brave, pious, and devoted 
servant of the royal cause, indirectly known to the 
student of English poetry as husband of the young 
lady on whose death, fourteen years earlier, Milton 
and Ben Jonson had written verses of elegiac grief. 
"Cromwell spent much time with God in prayer the 
night before the storm of Basing. He seldom fights 
without some text of scripture to support him." This 
time he rested on the eighth verse of the One Hun- 
dred and Fifteenth Psalm : "They that make them 
[idols] are like unto them; so is every one that trust- 
eth in them," — with private application to the theolo- 
gies of the popish Lord Winchester. "We stormed 
this morning," Oliver reports (October 14, 1645), 
"after six of the clock; the signal for falling on was 
the firing four of our cannon, which being done, our 
men fell on with great resolution and cheerfulness." 
Many of the enemy were put to the sword; all the 
sumptuous things abounding in the proud house were 
plundered; "popish books, with copes and such uten- 



THE DAY OF NASEBY 191 

sils," were flung into the purifying flame, and before 
long fire and destruction had left only blackened ruins. 
Among the prisoners was Winchester himself. In 
those days the word in season was held to be an urgent 
duty. Hugh Peters thought the moment happy for 
proving to his captive the error of his idolatrous ways, 
just as Cheynell hastened the end of Chillingworth 
by thrusting controversy upon his last hour, and as 
Clotworthy teased the unfortunate Laud at the in- 
stant when he was laying his head upon the block 
with questions upon what his assurance of salvation 
was founded. The stout-hearted cavalier of Basing, 
after long endurance of his pulpit tormentors, at last 
broke out and said that "if the king had no more 
ground in England than Basing House, he would still 
adventure as he had done, and so maintain it to the 
uttermost." 

After Basing the king had indeed not very much 
more ground in England or anywhere else. This was 
the twentieth garrison that had been taken that sum- 
mer. Fairfax, who had parted from Cromwell for a 
time after the fall of Bristol, pushed on into Devon 
and Cornwall, and by a series of rapid and vigorous 
operations cleared the Royalist forces out of the west. 
He defeated Hopton, that good soldier and honorable 
man, first at Torrington and then at Truro, and his 
last achievement was the capture of Exeter (April 9, 
1646). Cromwell, who had joined him shortly after 
the fall of Basing House, was with the army through- 
out these operations, watching the state of affairs at 
Westminster from a distance, in a frame of mind 
shown by the exhortations in his despatches, and con- 
stant to his steadfast rule of attending with close 
diligence to the actual duties of the day, leaving other 
things to come after in their place. After the fall of 



192 OLIVER CROMWELL 

Exeter, he was despatched by Fairfax to report their 
doings to the ParHament. He received the formal 
thanks of the House of Commons, and a more soHd 
recognition of his fidehty and service in the shape of 
estates of the value of two thousand five hundred 
pounds a year. Then Cromwell went back to Fair- 
fax and the investment of Oxford. 



BOOK THREE 



BooJ^ Ebrce 



CHAPTER I 



THE KING A PRISONER 



ONE Sunday at midnight (April 26, 1646) the 
king at Oxford came secretly to an appointed 
room in one of the colleges, had his hair and beard cut 
short, was dressed in the disguise of a servant, and 
at three in the morning, with a couple of companions, 
crossed over Magdalen Bridge and passed out of the 
gate, leaving behind him forever the gray walls and 
venerable towers, the churches and libraries, the clois- 
ters and gardens, of the ever-faithful city. He had 
not even made up his mind whither to go, whether 
to London or to the Scots. Riding through Maiden- 
head and Slough, the party reached Uxbridge and 
Hillingdon, and there at last after long and perplexed 
debate he resolved to set his face northward, but with 
no clear or settled design. For eight days men won- 
dered whether the fugitive king lay hidden in London 
or had gone to Ireland. Charles was afraid of Lon- 
don, and he hoped that the French envoy would 
assure him that the Scots were willing to grant him 
honorable conditions. Short of this, he was inclined 
rather to cast himself upon the English than to trust 
his countrymen. His choice was probably the wrong 
one. If he had gone to London he would have had 
a better chance than ever came to him again, of wid- 
ening the party divisions in the House of Commons, 

195 



196 OLIVER CROMWELL 

and he would have shown the Enghsh that he had 
that confidence in their loyahy which at this, as al- 
most at every other stage, the general body of them 
were little likely to disappoint or to betray. After all 
it mattered less where Charles was than what he was. 
If, in the language of the time, God had hardened 
him, if he was bent on "tinkling on bishops and delin- 
quents and such foolish toys," he might as well try 
his shallow arts in one place as another. Do what 
he would, grim men and grim facts had now fast hold 
upon him. He found his way to Harrow, thence to 
St. Albans, and thence to Downham. There the dis- 
guised king stayed at a tavern until word came from 
Montereul — not very- substantial, as it proved — that 
the Scots would give the assurances that he desired. 
Ten days after leaving Oxford Charles rode into the 
Scottish quarters at Southwell. He was never a free 
man again. Before the end of June Oxford surren- 
dered. The generals were blamed for the liberality 
of the terms of capitulation, but Cromwell insisted on 
their faithful observance, for he knew that the war 
was now at an end, and that in civil strife clemency 
must be the true policy. 

With the close of the war and the surrender of the 
person of the king a new crisis began, not less decisive 
than that which ended in the raising of the royal stan- 
dard four years before, but rapidly opening more ex- 
tensive ground of conflict and awakening more for- 
midable elements. Since then Europe has learned, or 
has not learned, the lesson that revolutions are apt to 
follow a regular order. It would be a complete mis- 
take, however, to think that England in 1647 was at 
all like France after the return of Bonaparte from his 
victorious campaigns in Italy. They were unlike, be- 
cause Cromwell was not a bandit, and the army of 




From the portrait by C. Janssen in the National Portrait Gallery. 
SIR EDWARD COKE. 



thp: king a prisoner 197 

the New Model was not a standing force of many 
tens of thousands of men, essentially conscienceless 
and only existing for war and conquest. The task 
was different. No situations in history really repro- 
duce themselves. In France the fabric of government 
had been violently dashed to pieces from foundation 
to crest. Those ideas in men's minds by which na- 
tional institutions are molded, and from which they 
mainly draw their life, had become faded and power- 
less. The nation had no reverence for the throne, and 
no affection either for the king while he was alive, 
or for his memory after they had killed him. Not a 
single institution stood sacred. In England, in 1647, 
no such terrible catastrophe had happened. A con- 
fused storm had swept over the waters, many a brave 
man had been carried overboard, but the ship of state 
seemed to have ridden out the hurricane. The king 
had been beaten, but the nation never dreamed of any 
thing but monarchy. The bishops had gone down^ 
but the nation desired a national church. The lords' 
had dwindled to a dubious shadow, but the nation/ 
cherished its unalterable reverence for Parliament. ^ 
The highest numbers in a division, even in the 
early days of the Long Parliament, do not seem to 
have gone above three hundred and eighty out of a 
total of near five hundred. After the war broke out 
they naturally sank to a far lower figure. At least 
a hundred members were absent in the discharge of 
local duties. A hundred more took the side of the 
king, and shook the dust of Westminster from off 
their feet. On the first Self-denying Ordinance one 
hundred and ninety members voted. The appoint- 
ment of Fairfax to be commander-in-chief was carried 
by one hundred and one against sixty-nine. The ordi- 
nary working strength was not above a hundred. The 



:) 



198 OLIVER CROMWELL 

weakness of moral authority in a house in this condi- 
tion was painfully evident, but so too were the diffi- 
culties in the way of any remedy. A general disso- 
lution, as if the country were in deep tranquillity 
instead of being torn and wearied by civil convulsion, 
was out of the question. Apart from the technical 
objection of calling a new Parliament without the 
king and the king's great seal, the risk of throwing 
upon doubtful constituencies all the vital issues then 
open and unsettled, was too formidable for any states- 
man in his senses to provoke. 

The House proceeded gradually, and after Naseby 
issued writs in small batches. Before the end of 
1646 about two hundred and thirty-five new members 
had been returned, and of these the majority either 
professed independency or leaned toward it, or at 
least were averse to Presbyterian exclusiveness, and 
not a few were officers in the army. Thus in all 
revolutions, as they move forward, stratum is super- 
imposed above stratum. Coke, Selden, Eliot, Hampden, 
Pym, the first generation of constitutional reformers, 
were now succeeded by a new generation of various 
revolutionary shades — Ireton, Ludlow, Hutchinson, 
Algernon Sidney, Fleetwood, and Blake. Cromwell, 
from his success as commander, his proved experience, 
and his stern adherence to the great dividing doctrine 
of toleration, was the natural leader of this new and 
powerful group. Sidney's stoical death years after 
on Tower Hill, and Blake's destruction of the Spanish 
silver-galleons in the bay of Santa Cruz, the most 
splendid naval achievement of that age, have made a 
deeper mark on historic imagination, but for the pur- 
poses of the hour it was Ireton who had the more im- 
portant part to play. Ireton, now five-and-thirty, was 
the son of a country gentleman in Nottinghamshire, 



THE KING A PRISONER 199 

had been bred at Oxford, and read law in the Temple. 
He had fought at Edgehill, had ridden by Cromwell's 
side at Gainsborough and Marston Moor, and, as we 
have seen, was in command of the horse on the left 
wing at Naseby, where his fortune was not good. 
No better brain was then at work on either side, no 
purer character. Some found that he had "the prin- 
ciples and the temper of a Cassius in him," for no 
better reason than that he was firm, never shrinking 
from the shadow of his convictions, active, discreet, 
and with a singular power of drawing others, includ- 
ing first of all Cromwell himself, over to his own 
judgment. He had that directness, definiteness, and 
persistency to which the Pliables of the world often 
misapply the ill-favored name of fanaticism. He was 
a man, says one, regardless of his own or any one's 
private interest wherever he thought the public service 
might be advantaged. He was very active, indus- 
trious, and stiff in his ways and purposes, says an- 
other; stout in the field, and wary and prudent in 
counsel ; exceedingly forward as to the business of the 
Commonwealth. "Cromwell had a great opinion of 
him, and no man could prevail so much, nor order 
him so far, as Ireton could." He was so diligent in the 
public service, and so careless of all belonging to him- 
self, that he never regarded what food he ate, what 
clothes he wore, what horse he mounted, or at what 
hour he went to rest. Cromwell good-naturedly im- 
plies in Ireton almost excessive fluency with his pen; 
he does not write to him, he says, because "one line 
of mine begets many of his." The framing of con- 
stitutions is a pursuit that has fallen into just dis- 
credit in later days, but the power of intellectual con- 
centration and the constructive faculty displayed in 
Ireton's plans of constitutional revision, mark him as 



200 OLIVER CROMWELL 

a man of the first order in that line. He was enough 
of a lawyer to comprehend with precision the prin- 
ciples and forms of government, but not too much 
of a lawyer to prize and practise new invention and 
resource. If a fresh constitution could have been 
made, Ireton was the man to make it. Not less re- 
markable than his grasp and capacity of mind was 
his disinterestedness. When he was serving in Ire- 
land, Parliament ordered a settlement of two thou- 
sand pounds a year to be made upon him. The news 
was so unacceptable to him that when he heard of it 
he said that they had many just debts they had better 
pay before making any such presents, and that for 
himself he had no need of their land and would have 
none of it. It was to this comrade in arms and coun- 
sel that Cromwell, a year after Naseby (1646), gave 
in marriage his daughter Bridget, then a girl of two- 
and-twenty. 

The king's surrender to the Scots created new en- 
tanglements. The episode lasted from May, 1646, to 
January, 1647. ^^ made worse the bad feeling that 
had for long been growing between the English and 
the Scots. The religious or political quarrel about 
uniform presbytery, charges of military uselessness, 
disputes about money, disputes about the border 
strongholds, all worked with the standing interna- 
tional jealousy to produce a tension that had long been 
dangerous, and in another year in the play of Scottish 
factions against one another was to become more dan- 
gerous still. 

Terms of a settlement had been propounded to the 
king in the Nineteen Propositions of York, on the 
eve of the war in 1642; in the treaty of Oxford at 
the beginning of 1643; i" the treaty of Uxbridge in 
1644-45, the failure of which led to the New Model 




From a miniature by Crosse at Windsor Castle. 
By special permission of Her Majesty the Queen. 

BRIDGET CROMWELL 
(MRS. IRETON, AND LATER MRS. FLEETWOOD). 



THE KING A PRISONER 201 

and to Naseby. By the Nineteen Propositions now 
made to him at Newcastle the king was to swear to 
the Covenant, and to make all his subjects do the 
same. Archbishops, bishops, and all other dignitaries 
were to be utterly abolished and taken away. The 
children of papists were to be educated by Protestants 
in the Protestant faith; and mass was not to be said 
either at court or anywhere else. Parliament was to 
control all the military forces of the kingdom for 
twenty years, and to raise money for them as it might 
think fit. An immense list of the king's bravest 
friends was to be proscribed. Little wonder is it that 
these proposals, some of them even now so odious, 
some so intolerable, seemed to Charles to strike the 
crown from his head as effectually as if it were the 
stroke of the ax. 

Charles himself never cherished a more foolish 
dream than this of his Scottish custodians, that he 
would turn Covenanter. Scottish Covenanters and 
English Puritans found themselves confronted by a 
conscience as rigid as their own. Before the summer 
was over, the king's madness, as it seemed to them, 
had confounded all his Presbyterian friends. They 
were in no frame of mind to apprehend even dimly 
the king's views of the divine right of bishops as the 
very foundation of the Anglican Church, and the one 
sacred link with the church universal. Yet they were 
themselves just as tenacious of the divine right of 
presbytery. Their Independent enemies looked on 
with a stern satisfaction that was slowly beginning to 
take a darker and more revengeful cast. 

In spite of his asseverations, nobody believed that 
the king "stuck upon Episcopacy for any conscience." 
Here, as time was to show, the world did Charles 
much less than justice; but he did not conceal from 



202 OLIVER CROMWELL 

the queen and others who urged him to swallow Pres- 
bytery, that he had a political no less than a religious 
objection to it. "The nature of Presbyterian govern- 
ment is to steal or force the crown from the king's 
head, for their chief maxim is (and I know it to be 
true) that all kings must submit to Christ's kingdom, 
of which they are the sole governors, the king having 
but a single and no negative voice in their assemblies." 
When Charles said he knew this to be true, he was 
thinking of all the bitter hours that his father had 
passed in conflict with the clergy. He had perhaps 
heard of the scene between James VI and Andrew 
Melville in 1596; how the preacher bore him down, 
calling the king God's silly vassal, and taking him by 
the sleeve, told him that there are two kings and 
two kingdoms in Scotland : there is Christ Jesus the 
King, and his kingdom the kirk, whose subject King 
James VI is, and of whose kingdom not a king, not 
a lord, not a head, but a member. "And they whom 
Christ has called and commanded to watch over his 
kirk and govern his spiritual kingdom, have sufficient 
power of him and authority so to do, the which no 
Christian, king nor prince, should control and dis- 
charge, but fortify and assist." 

The sincerity of his devotion to the church did not 
make Charles a plain-dealer. He agreed to what was 
proposed to him about Ireland, supposing, as he told 
Bellievre, the French ambassador, that the ambiguous 
expression found in the terms in which it was drawn 
up, would give him the means by-and-by of interpret- 
ing it to his advantage. Charles, in one of his letters 
to the queen, lets us see what he means by an am- 
biguous expression. "It is true," he tells her, "that it 
may be I give them leave to hope for more than I 
intended, but my words are only 'to endeavor to give 



THE KING A PRISONER 203 

them satisfaction.' " Then he is anxious to explain 
that though it is true that as to places he gives them 
some more likely hopes, "yet neither in that is there 
any absolute engagement, but there is the condition 
'of giving me encouragement thereunto by their 
ready inclination to peace' annexed with it." 

It is little wonder that just as Royalists took dis- 
simulation to be the key to Cromwell, so it has been 
counted the master vice of Charles. Yet Charles was 
not the only dissembler. At this moment the Scots 
themselves boldly declared that all charges about their 
dealing with Mazarin and the queen were wholly false, 
when in fact they were perfectly true. In later days 
the Lord Protector dealt with Mazarin on the basis of 
toleration for Catholics, but his promises were not to 
be publicly announced. Revolutions do not make the 
best soil for veracity. It would be hard to deny that 
before Charles great dissemblers had been wise and 
politic princes. His ancestor King Henry VII, his 
predecessor Queen Elizabeth of famous memory, his 
wife's father Henry IV of France, Louis XI, Charles 
V. and many another sagacious figure in the history 
of European states, had freely and effectively adopted 
the maxims of Machiavelli. In truth, the cause of 
the king's ruin lay as much in his position as in his 
character. The directing portion of the nation had 
made up its mind to alter the relations of crown and 
Parliament, and it Avas hardly possible in the nature 
of things — men and kings being what they are — 
that Charles should passively fall into the new posi- 
tion that his victorious enemies had made for him. 
Europe has seen many constitutional monarchies at- 
tempted or set up within the last hundred years. In 
how many cases has the new system been carried on 
without disturbing an old dynasty? We may say 



204 OLIVER CROMWELL 

of Charles I what has been said of Louis XVL 
Every day they were asking the king for the impos- 
sible — to deny his ancestors, to respect the constitu- 
tion that stripped him, to love the revolution that de- 
stroyed him. How could it be? 

It is beside the mark, again, to lay the blame upon 
the absence of a higher intellectual atmosphere. It 
was not a bad intellectual basis that made the catas- 
trophe certain, but antagonism of will, the clash of 
character, the violence of party passion and person- 
ality. The king was determined not to give up what 
the reformers were determined that he should not 
keep. He felt that to yield would be to betray both 
those wdio had gone before him, and his children who 
were to come after. His opponents felt that to fall 
back would be to go both body and soul into chains. 
So Presbyterians and Independents feared and hated 
each other, not merely because each failed in intellec- 
tual perception of the case of their foe, but because 
their blood was up, because they believed dissent in 
opinion to mean moral obliquity, because sectional 
interests were at stake, and for all those other reasons 
which spring from that spirit of sect and party which 
is so innate in man, and always mingles so much evil 
with whatever it may have of good. 

The undoing of Charles was not merely his turn 
for intrigue and double-dealing; it was blindness to 
signs, mismeasurement of forces, dishevelled confu- 
sion of means and ends. Unhappily mere foolishness 
in men responsible for the government of great states 
is apt to be a curse as heavy as the crimes of tyrants. 
With strange self-confidence Charles was hard at 
work upon schemes and combinations, all at best most 
difficult in themselves, and each of them violently in- 
consistent with the other. He was hopefully nego- 







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ALGERNON SIDNEY. 





THE KING A PRISONER 205 

tiating with the Independents, and at the same time 
both with the CathoHc Irish and with the Presbyterian 
Scots. He looked to the support of the Covenanters, 
and at the same time he rehed upon Montrose, be- 
tween whom and the Covenanters there was now an 
antagonism almost as vindictive as a Corsican blood- 
feud. He professed a desire to come to an under- 
standing with his people and Parliament, yet he had 
a chimerical plan for collecting a new army to crush 
both Parliament and people ; and he was looking each 
day for the arrival of Frenchmen, or Lorrainers, or 
Dutchmen or Danes, and their march through Kent 
or Suffolk upon his capital. While negotiating with 
men to whom hatred of the Pope was the breath of 
their nostrils, he was allowing the queen to bargain 
for a hundred thousand crowns in one event, and a 
second hundred in another, from Antichrist himself. 
He must have known, moreover, that nearly every 
move in this stealthy game was more or less well 
known to all those other players against whom he 
had so improvidently matched himself. 

The queen's letters during all these long months 
of tribulation shed as much light upon the character 
of Charles as upon her own. Complaint of his lack 
of constancy and resolution is the everlasting refrain. 
Want of perseverance in his plans, she tells him, has 
been his ruin. When he talks of peace with the Par- 
liament she vows that she will go into a convent, for 
she will never trust herself with those who will then 
be his masters. "If you change again, farewell for- 
ever. If you have broken your resolution, nothing 
but death for me. As long as the Parliament lasts 
you are no king for me; I will not put my foot in 
England." We can have no better measure of 
Charles's weakness than that in the hour of adversity, 



2o6 OLIVER CROMWELL 

so desperate for both of them, he should be thus ad- 
dressed by a wife to whom he had been wedded for 
twenty years. 

His submission is complete. He will not have a 
gentleman for his son's bedchamber, nor Montrose 
for his own bedchamber, without her consent. He 
will not decide whether it is best for him to make 
for Ireland, France, or Denmark, until he knows what 
she thinks best. "If I quit my conscience," he pleads, 
in the famous sentiment of Lovelace, "how unworthy 
I make myself of thy love!" With that curious 
streak of immovable scruple so often found in men 
in whom equivocation is a habit of mind and practice, 
he had carefully kept his oath never to mention mat- 
ters of religion to his Catholic queen, and it is only 
under stress of this new misconstruction that he seeks 
to put himself right with her, by explaining his posi- 
tion about apostolic succession, the divine right of 
bishops, and the absolute unlawfulness of Presbyte- 
rianism, even the ally and confederate of rebellion. 

Nothing that he was able to do could disarm the 
universal anger and suspicion which the seizure of 
the king's papers at Naseby had begun, and the dis- 
covery of a copy of Glamorgan's treaty at Sligo (Oc- 
tober, 1645) ^^d carried still deeper. The Presby- 
terians in their discomfiture openly expressed their 
fears that the king was now undone forever. Charles 
in a panic offered to hand over the management of 
Ireland to his Parliament, thus lightly dropping the 
whole Irish policy on which he had for long been 
acting, flinging to the winds all his engagements, un- 
derstandings, and promises to the Irish Catholics, 
and handing them over without conditions to the 
tender mercies of enemies fiercely thirsting for a 
bloody retaliation. His recourse to foreign powers 



THE KING A PRISONER 207 

was well known. The despatch of the Prince of 
Wales to join his mother in France was felt to be 
the unsealing of "a. fountain of foreign war" ; as 
the queen had got the prince into her hands, she 
could make the youth go to mass and marry the 
Duke of Orleans's daughter. Ten thousand men 
from Ireland were to overrun the Scottish lowlands, 
and then to raise the malignant north of England. 
The King of Denmark's son was to invade the north 
of Scotland with three or four thousand Dutch vet- 
erans. Eight or ten thousand French were to join 
the remnant of the royal army in Cornwall. Even 
the negotiations that had been so long in progress at 
Miinster, and were by-and-by to end the Thirty Years' 
War and consummate Richelieu's great policy in the 
treaties of Westphalia, were viewed with apprehen- 
sion by the English reformers, for a peace might 
mean the release both of France and Spain for an 
attack upon England in these days of divine wrath 
and unsearchable judgments against the land. Prayer 
and fasting were never more diligently resorted to 
than now. The conflict of the two English parties 
lost none of its sharpness or intensity. The success 
of the policy of the Independents, so remarkably 
shown at Naseby, pursued as it had been against com- 
mon opinion at Westminster, became more command- 
ing with every new disclosure of the king's designs. 
In the long and intricate negotiations with the king 
and with the Scots at Newcastle, Independent aims 
had been justified and had prevailed. The baffled 
Presbyterians only became the more embittered. At 
the end of January, 1647, ^ I'^^w situation became 
defined. The Scots, unable to induce the king to 
make those concessions in religion without which not 
a Scot would take arms to help him, and having re- 



208 OLIVER CROMWELL 

ceived an instalment of the pay that was due to them, 
marched away to their homes across the border. Com- 
missioners from the EngHsh ParHament took their 
place as custodians of the person of the king. By 
order of the two houses, Holmby in the county of 
Northampton was assigned to him as his residence, 
and here he remained until the month of June, when 
once more the scene was violently transformed. 



CHAPTER II 

THE CRISIS OF 1 647 

IF ever there was in the world a revolution with 
ideas as well as interests, with principle and not 
egotism for its mainspring, it was this. At the same 
time as England, France was torn by civil war, but the 
civil war of the Fronde was the conflict of narrow aris- 
tocratic interests with the newly consolidated suprem- 
acy of the monarch. It was not the forerunner of 
the French Revolution, with all its hopes and promises 
of a regenerated time; the Fronde was the expiring 
struggle of the belated survivors of the feudal age. 
The English struggle was very different. Never was 
a fierce party conflict so free of men who, in Dante's 
blighting phrase, "were for themselves." Yet much 
as there was in the Puritan uprising to inspire and 
exalt, its ideas, when tested by the pressure of circum- 
stance, showed themselves unsettled and vague; prin- 
ciples were slow to ripen, forces were indecisively dis- 
tributed, its theology did not help. This was what 
Cromwell, henceforth the great practical mind of the 
movement, was now painfully to discover. 

It was not until 1645 that Cromwell had begun to 
stand clearly out in the popular imagination, alike of 
friends and foes. He was the idol of his troops. He 
prayed and preached among them; he played uncouth 
practical jokes with them ; he was not above a snow- 

14 209 



2IO OLIVER CROMWELL 

ball match against them ; he was a brisk, energetic, 
skilful soldier, and he was an invincible commander. 
In Parliament he made himself felt, as having the art of 
hitting the right debating-nail upon the head. The saints 
had an instinct that he was their man, and that they 
could trust him to stand by them when the day of trial 
came. A good commander of horse, say the experts, 
is as rare as a good commander-in-chief, he needs so 
rare a union of prudence with impetuosity. What 
Cromwell was in the field he was in council ; bold, but 
wary ; slow to raise his arm, but swift to strike ; fiery 
in the assault, but knowing when to draw bridle. 
These rare combinations were invaluable; for even the 
heated and headlong revolutionary is not sorry to 
find a leader cooler than himself. Above all, and as 
the mainspring of all, he had heart and conscience. 
While the Scots are striving to make the king into a 
Covenanter, and the Parliament to get the Scots out of 
the country, and the Independents to find means of 
turning the political scale against the Presbyterians, 
Cromwell finds time to intercede with a Royalist gen- 
tleman on behalf of some honest poor neighbors who 
are being molested for their theologies. To the same 
time (1646) belongs that well-known passage where 
he says to one of his daughters that her sister bewails 
her vanity and carnal mind, and seeks after what will 
satisfy : "And thus to be a Seeker is to be of the best 
sect next to a Finder, and such an one shall every faith- 
ful, humble Seeker be at the end. Happy Seeker, 
happy Finder!" 

In no contest in our history has the disposition of 
the pieces on the political chessboard been more per- 
plexed. What Oliver perceived as he scanned each 
quarter of the political horizon was first a Parliament in 
which the active leaders were Presbyterians, confronted 



THE CRISIS OF 1647 211 

by an army, at once suspected and suspicious, whose 
active leaders were Independents. The fervor of the 
preachers had been waxing hotter and still hotter, and 
the angry trumpet sounding a shriller blast. He saw 
the city of London, which had been the mainstay of 
the Parliament in the war, now just as strenuous for 
a good peace. He saw an army in which he knew that 
his own authority stood high, but where events were 
soon to show that he did not yet know all the fierce 
undercurrents and dark and pent-up forces. Finally, 
he saw a king beaten in the field, but still unbending 
in defense of his religion, his crown, and his friends, 
and boldly confident that nothing could prevent him 
from still holding the scale between the two rival bands 
of his triumphant enemies. Outside this kingdom he 
saw the combative and dogged Scots who had just 
been persuaded to return to their own country, still 
sharply watching English affairs over the border, and 
still capable of drawing the sword for king or for Par- 
liament, as best might suit the play of their own in- 
furiated factions. Finally there was Ireland, dis- 
tracted, dangerous, sullen, and a mainspring of 
difficulty and confusion, now used by the Parliament 
in one way against the army, and now by the king in 
another way against both army and Parliament. The 
cause in short, whether Cromwell yet looked so far in 
front or not, was face to face with the gloomy alter- 
natives of a perfidious restoration, or a new campaign 
and war at all hazards. 

There is no other case in history where the victors 
in a great civil war were left so entirely without the 
power of making their own settlement, and the van- 
quished so plainly umpires in their own c|uarrel. The 
beaten king was to have another chance, his best and 
his last. Even now if we could read old history like 



212 OLIVER CROMWELL 

a tale of which we do not know the end, whether it 
should be that sentiment has drawn the reader's sym- 
pathies to the side of the king, or right reason drawn 
them to the side of the king's adversaries, it might 
quicken the pulse when he comes to the exciting and 
intricate events of 1647, ^^'^^ sees his favorite cause, 
whichever it chances to be, trembling in the scale. 

Clarendon says that though the Presbyterians were 
just as malicious and as wicked as the Independents, 
there was this great difference between them, that the 
Independents always did what made for the end they 
had in view, while the Presbyterians always did what 
was most sure to cross their own design and hinder 
their own aim. These are differences that in all ages 
mark the distinction between any strong political 
party and a weak one ; between powerful leaders who 
get things done, and impotent leaders who are always 
waiting for something that never happens. 

The pressure of the armed struggle with the king 
being withdrawn, party spirit in Parliament revived in 
full vigor. The Houses were face to face with the 
dangerous task of disbanding the powerful force that 
had fought their battle and established their authority, 
and was fully conscious of the magnitude of its work. 
To undertake disbandment in England was indispen- 
sable ; the nation was groaning under the burden of 
intolerable taxation, and the necessity of finding troops 
for service in Ireland was urgent. The City clamored 
for disbandment, and that a good peace should be made 
with his Majesty. The party interest of the Presby- 
terian majority, moreover, pointed in the same way; 
to break up the New Model, and dispose of as many 
of the soldiers as could be induced to reenlist for the 
distant wilds of Ireland, would be to destroy the for- 
tress of their Independent rivals. 



THE CRISIS OF 1647 213 

There is no evidence that Cromwell took any part 
in the various disbanding votes as they passed through 
the House of Commons in the early months of 1647, 
and he seems to have been slack in his attendance. No 
operation was ever conducted with worse judgment. 
Instead of meeting the men frankly, Parliament chaf- 
fered, framed their act of indemnity too loosely, offered 
only eight weeks of pay though between fifty and sixty 
weeks were overdue, and then when the soldiers ad- 
dressed them, suppressed their petitions or burned 
them by the hangman, and passed angry resolutions 
against their authors as enemies of the state and dis- 
turbers of the public peace. This is the party of order 
all over. It is a curious circumstance that a proposal 
should actually have been made in Parliament to arrest 
Cromwell for complicity in these proceedings of the 
army at the moment when some of the soldiers, on the 
other hand, blamed him for stopping and undermining 
their petitions, and began to think they had been in too 
great a hurry to give him their affections. 

The army in their quarters at Saffron Walden grew 
more and more restive. They chose agents, entered 
into correspondence for concerted action, and framed 
new petitions. Three troopers, who brought a letter 
with these communications, addressed to Cromwell 
and two of the other generals in Parliament, w^ere sum- 
moned to the bar, and their stoutness so impressed 
or scared the House that Cromwell and Ireton, Fleet- 
wood and the sturdy Skippon, were despatched to the 
'army to feel the ground. They held a meeting in the 
church at Saffron Walden, with a couple of hundred 
officers and a number of private soldiers, and listened 
to their reports from the various regiments. Nothing 
was said either about religion or politics; arrears 
were the sore point, and if there were no better offer 



214 OLIVER CROMWELL 

on that head, then no disbandment. The whole scene 
and its tone vividly recall the proceedings of a modern 
trade-union in the reasonable stages of a strike. In 
temper, habit of mind, plain sense, and even in words 
and form of speech, the English soldier of the New 
Model two centuries and a half ago must have been 
very much like the sober and respectable miner, plow- 
man, or carter of to-day. But the violence of war 
had hardened their fiber, had made them rough under 
contradiction, and prepared them both for bold 
thoughts and bolder acts. 

Meanwhile a thing of dark omen happened. At the 
beginning of May, while Cromwell was still at Saffron 
Walden, it was rumored that certain foot-soldiers 
about Cambridgeshire had given out that they would 
go to Holmby to fetch the king. The story caused 
much offense and scandal, but it very soon came true. 
One summer evening small parties of horse were ob- 
served in the neighborhood of Holmby. At daybreak 
Cornet Joyce made his way within the gates at the 
head of five hundred mounted troopers. Later in the 
day a report got abroad that the Parliament would 
send a force to carry the king to London. Joyce and 
his party promptly made up their minds. At ten at 
night the cornet awoke the king from slumber, and 
respectfully requested him to move to other quarters 
next day. The king hesitated. At six in the morn- 
ing the conversation was resumed. The king asked 
Joyce whether he was acting by the general's commis- 
sion. Joyce said that he was not, and pointed as his 
authority to the five hundred men on their horses in 
the courtyard. "As well-written a commission, and 
with as fine a frontispiece, as I have ever seen in my 
life," pleasantly said Charles. The king had good 
reason for his cheerfulness. He was persuaded that 



THE CRISIS OF 1647 215 

the cornet could not act without the counsel of greater 
persons, and if so, this could only mean that the mili- 
tary leaders were resolved on a breach with the Parlia- 
ment. From such a quarrel Charles might well believe 
that to him nothing but good could come. 

Whether Cromwell was really concerned either in 
the king's removal, or in any other stage of this ob- 
scure transaction, remains an open question. What 
is not improbable is that Cromwell may have told Joyce 
to secure the king's person at Holmby against the sus- 
pected designs of the Parliament, and that the actual 
removal was prompted on the spot by a supposed emer- 
gency. On the other hand, the hypothesis is hardly 
any more improbable that the whole design sprang from 
the agitators, and that Cromwell had no part in it. 
It was noticed later as a significant coincidence that on 
the very evening on which Joyce forced his way into 
the king's bedchamber, Cromwell, suspecting that the 
leaders of the Presbyterian majority were about to 
arrest him, mounted his horse and rode off to join the 
army. His share in Joyce's seizure and removal of 
the king afterward is less important than his approval 
of it as a strong and necessary lesson to the majority 
in the Parliament. 

So opened a more startling phase of revolutionary 
transformation. For Joyce's exploit at Holmby be- 
gins the descent down those fated steeps in which each 
successive violence adds new momentum to the vio- 
lence that is to follow, and pays retribution for the 
violence that has gone before. Purges, proscriptions, 
camp courts, executions, major-generals, dictatorship, 
restoration — this was the toilsome, baffling path on to 
which, in spite of hopeful auguries and prognostica- 
tions, both sides were now irrevocably drawn. 

Parliament was at length really awake to the power 



2i6 OLIVER CROMWELL 

of the soldiers, and their determination to use it. The 
City, with firmer nerve but still with lively alarm, 
Avatched headquarters rapidly changed to St. Albans, 
to Berkhampstead, to Uxbridge, to Wycombe — now 
drawing off, then hovering closer, launching to-day a 
declaration, to-morrow a remonstrance, next day a 
vindication, like dangerous flashes out of a sullen cloud. 

For the first time "purge" took its place in the politi- 
cal vocabulary of the day. Just as the king had at- 
tacked the five members, so now the army attacked 
eleven, and demanded the ejection of the whole group 
of Presbyterian leaders from the House of Commons, 
with Denzil Holies at the head of them (June 16-26). 
Among the Eleven were men as pure and as patriotic 
as the immortal Five, and when we think that the end 
of these heroic twenty years was the Restoration, it is 
not easy to see why we should denounce the pedantry 
of the Parliament, whose ideas for good or ill at last 
prevailed, and should reserve all our glorification for 
the army, who proved to have no ideas that would 
either work or that the country would accept. The 
demand for the expulsion of the Eleven was the first 
step in the path which was to end in the removal of 
the Bauble in 1653. 

Incensed by these demands, and by what they took 
to be the weakness of their confederates in the Com- 
mons, the City addressed one strong petition after 
another, and petitions were speedily followed by actual 
revolt. The seamen and the watermen on the river- 
side, the young men and apprentices from Aldersgate 
and Cheapside, entered into one of the many solemn 
engagements of these distracted years, and when their 
engagement was declared by the bewildered Commons 
to be dangerous, insolent, and treasonable, excited 
mobs trooped down to Westminster, made short work 




From the original portrait at Chequers Court, by permission of 
Mrs. Frankland-Russell-Astley. 

CORNET GEORGE JOYCE. 



THE CRISIS OF 1647 217 

of the nine gentlemen who that day composed the 
House of Lords, forcing them to cross the obnoxious 
declaration off their journals, tumultuously besieged 
the House of Commons, some of them even rudely 
making their way, as Charles had done six years be- 
fore, within the sacred doors and on to the inviolable 
floor, until members drew their swords and forced the 
intruders out. When the Speaker would have left the 
House, the mob returned to the charge, drove him back 
to his chair, and compelled him to put the question 
that the king be invited to come to London forthwith 
with honor, freedom, and safety. So readily, as usual, 
did reaction borrow at second hand the turbulent ways 
of revolution. 

In disgust at this violent outrage, the speakers of 
the two houses (July 30), along with a considerable 
body of members, betook themselves to the army. 
When they accompanied Fairfax and his officers on 
horseback in a review on Hounslow Heath, the troop- 
ers greeted them with mighty acclamations of "Lords 
and Commons and a free Parliament !" The effect of 
the manoeuvers of the reactionists in the City was to 
place the army in the very position that they were 
eager to take, of being protectors of what they chose to 
consider the true Parliament, to make a movement upon 
London not only defensible, but inevitable, to force the 
hand of Cromwell, and to inflame still higher the ardor 
of the advocates of the revolutionary Thorough. Of the 
three great acts of military force against the Parlia- 
ment, now happened the first (August, 1647). The 
doors were not roughly closed as Oliver closed them 
on the historic day in April, 1653, ^^^ there was no 
sweeping purge like that of Pride in December, 1648. 
Fairfax afterward sought credit for having now re- 
sisted the demand to put military violence upon the 



2i8 OLIVER CROMWELL 

House, but Cromwell with his assent took a course 
that came to the same thing. He stationed cavalry 
in Hyde Park, and then marched down to his place in 
the House, accompanied by soldiers, who after he had 
gone in hung about the various approaches with a sig- 
nificance that nobody mistook. The soldiers had defi- 
nitely turned politicians, and even without the experi- 
ence that Europe has passed through since, it ought not 
to have been very hard to foresee what their politics 
would be. 



CHAPTER III 

THE OFFICERS AS POLITICIANS 

ENGLAND throughout showed herself the least 
revolutionary of the three kingdoms, hardly revo- 
lutionary at all. Here was little of the rugged, dour, 
and unyielding persistency of the northern Coven- 
anters, none of the savage aboriginal frenzy of the 
Irish, Cromwell was an Englishman all over, and it 
is easy to conceive the dismay with which in the first 
half of 1647 he slowly realized the existence of a fierce 
insurgent leaven in the army. The worst misfortune 
of a civil war, said Cromwell's contemporar}'^, De Retz, 
is that one becomes answerable even for the mischief 
one has not done. "All the fools turn madmen, and 
even the wisest have no chance of either acting or 
speaking as if they were in their right wits." In spite 
of the fine things that have been said of heroes, and the 
might of their will, a statesman in such a case as Crom- 
well's soon finds how little he can do to create marked 
situations, and how the main part of his business is in 
slowly parrying, turning, managing circumstances for 
which he is not any more responsible than he is for 
his own existence, and yet which are his masters, and 
of which he can only make the best or the worst. 

Cromwell never showed a more sagacious insight 
into the hard necessities of the situation than when he 
endeavored to form an alliance between the king and 

219 



220 OLIVER CROMWELL 

the army. All the failures and disasters that harassed 
him from this until the day of his death, arose from 
the breakdown of the negotiations now undertaken. 
The restoration of Charles I by Cromwell would have 
been a very different thing from the restoration of 
Charles II by Monk. In the midsummer of 1647 
Cromwell declared that he desired no alteration of the 
civil government, and no meddling with the Presby- 
terian settlement, and no opening of a way for "licen- 
tious liberty under pretence of obtaining ease for 
tender consciences." 

Unhappily for any prosperous issue, Cromwell and 
his men were met by a constancy as fervid as their 
own. Charles followed slippery and crooked paths ; 
but he was as sure as Cromwell that he had God on his 
side, that he was serving divine purposes and uphold- 
ing things divinely instituted. He was as unyielding 
as Cromwell in fidelity to what he accounted the stand- 
ards of personal duty and national well-being. He 
was as patient as Cromwell in facing the ceaseless 
buffets and misadventures that were at last to sweep 
him down the cataract. Charles was not without ex- 
cuse for supposing that by playing off army against 
Parliament and Independent against Presbyterian, he 
would still come into his own again. The jealousy 
and ill-will between the contending parties was at its 
height, and there was no reason either in conscience 
or in policy why he should not make the most of that 
fact. Each side sought to use him, and from his own 
point of view he had a right to strike the best bargain 
that he could with either. Unfortunately, he could 
not bring himself to strike any bargain at all, and the 
chance passed. Cromwell's efforts only served to 
weaken his own authority with the army, and he was 
driven to give up hopes of the king, as he had already 



THE OFFICERS AS POLITICIANS 221 

been driven to give up hopes of the Parhament. This 
was in effect to be thrown back against all his wishes 
and instincts upon the army alone, and to find himself, 
by nature a moderator with a passion for order in its 
largest meaning, flung into the midst of military and 
constitutional anarchy. 

Carlyle is misleading when, in deprecating a com- 
parison between French Jacobins and English Sec- 
taries, he says that, apart from difference in situation, 
"there is the difference between the believers in Jesus 
Christ and believers in Jean Jacques, which is still 
more considerable." It would be nearer the mark to 
say that the Sectaries were beforehand with Jean 
Jacques, and that half the troubles that confronted 
Cromwell and his men sprang from the fact that Eng- 
lish Sectaries were now saying to one another some- 
thing very like what Frenchmen said in Rousseau's 
dialect a hundred and forty years later. "No man 
who knows right," says Milton, "can be so stupid as 
to deny that all men zvere naturally born free." In 
the famous document drawn up in the army in the 
autumn of 1647, ^^^^ known (along with two other 
documents under the same designation propounded in 
1648-49) as the Agreement of the People, the sover- 
eignty of the people through their representatives ; the 
foundation of society in common right, liberty, and 
safety; the freedom of every man in the faith of his 
religion ; and all the rest of the catalogue of the rights 
of man, are all set forth as clearly as they ever were 
by Robespierre or by Jefferson. In truth the phrase 
may differ, and the sanctions and the temper may 
differ; and yet in the thought of liberty, equality, and 
fraternity, in the dream of natural rights, in the rain- 
bow vision of an inalienable claim to be left free in life, 
liberty and the pursuit of happiness, there is something 



222 OLIVER CROMWELL 

that has for centuries from age to age evoked spon- 
taneous thrills in the hearts of toiling, suffering, hope- 
ful men — something that they need no philosophic 
book to teach them. 

When Baxter came among the soldiers after Naseby, 
he found them breathing the spirit of conquerors. 
The whole atmosphere was changed. They now took 
the king for a tyrant and an enemy, and wondered only 
whether, if they might fight against him, they might 
not also kill or crush him — in itself no unwarrantable 
inference. He heard them crying out, "What were 
the Lords of England but William the Conqueror's 
colonels, or the barons but his majors, or the knights 
but his captains?" From this pregnant conclusions 
followed. Logic had begun its work, and in men of a 
certain temperament political logic is apt to turn into 
a strange poison. They will not rest until they have 
drained first principles to their very dregs. They 
argue down from the necessities of abstract reasoning 
until they have ruined all the favoring possibilities of 
concrete circumstance. 

We have at this time to distinguish political councils 
from military. There was almost from the first a 
standing council of war, exclusively composed of offi- 
cers of higher rank. This body was not concerned 
in politics. The general council of the army, 
which was first founded during the summer of 1647, 
was a mixture of officers and the agents of the private 
soldiers. It contained certain of the generals, and 
four representatives from each regiment, two of them 
officers and two of them soldiers chosen by the men. 
This important assembly, with its two combined 
branches, did not last in that shape for more than a 
few months. After the execution of the king, the 
agitators, or direct representatives of the men, dropped 



THE OFFICERS AS POLITICIANS 223 

off or were shut out, and what remained was a council 
of officers. They retained their power until the end; 
it was with them that Cromwell had to deal. The 
politics of the army became the governing element of 
the situation; it was here that those new forces were 
being evolved which, when the Long Parliament first 
met, nobody intended or foresaw, and that gave to the 
Rebellion a direction that led Cromwell into strange 
latitudes. 

Happy chance has preserved, and the industry of a 
singularly clear-headed and devoted student has res- 
cued and explored, vivid and invaluable pictures of the 
half-chaotic scene. At Saffron Walden, in May 
(1647), Cromwell urged the officers to strengthen 
the deference of their men for the authority of Parlia- 
ment, for if once that authority were to fail, confusion 
must follow. At Reading, in July, the position had 
shifted, the temperature had risen. Parliament in con- 
federacy with the City had become the enemy, though 
there was still a strong group at Westminster who 
were the soldier's friends. Cromwell could no longer 
proclaim the authority of Parliament as the paramount 
object, for he knew this to be a broken reed. But he 
changed ground as little as he could and as slowly as 
he could. 

Here we first get a clear sight of the temper of 
Cromwell as a statesman grappling at the same mo- 
ment with Presbyterians in Parliament, with Extrem- 
ists in the army, with the king in the closet — a task for a 
hero. In manner he was always what Clarendon calls 
rough and brisk. He declared that he and his colleagues 
were as swift as anybody else in their feelings and de- 
sires; nay, more, "Truly I am very often judged as 
one that goes too fast that way," and it is the peculiar- 
ity of men like me, he says, to think dangers more 



224 OLIVER CROMWELL 

imaginary than real, "to be always making haste, and 
more sometimes perhaps than good speed." This is 
one of the too few instructive glimpses that we have 
of the real Oliver. Unity was first. Let no man 
exercise his parts to strain things, and to open up long 
disputes or needless contradictions, or to sow the seeds 
of dissatisfaction. They might be in the right or we 
might be in the right, but if they were to divide, then 
were they both in the wrong. On the merits of the 
particular cjuestion of the moment, it was idle to tell 
him that their friends in London would like to see them 
march up. " 'T is the general good of the kingdom 
that we ought to consult. That 's the question, 
what 's for their good, not zvhat pleases them.'' They 
might be driven to march on to London, he told them, 
but an understanding was the most desirable way, and 
the other a way of necessity, and not to be done but in 
a way of necessity. What was obtained by an under- 
standing would be firm and durable. "Things ob- 
tained by force, though never so good in themselves, 
zvould be both less to their honor, and less likely to 
last.'' "Really, really, have what you will have; that 
you have by force, I look upon as nothing." "I could 
wish," he said earlier, "that we might remember this 
always, that zvhat zve gain in a free zvay, it is better 
than tzvice as much in a forced, and zvill be more truly 
ours and our posterity's." It is one of the harshest 
ironies of history that the name of this famous man, 
who started on the severest stage of his journey with 
this broad and far reaching principle, should have be- 
come the favorite symbol of the shallow faith that 
force is the only remedy. 

The general council of the army at Putney in Octo- 
ber and November (1647) became a constituent as- 
sembly. In June Ireton had drawn up for them a 



THE OFFICERS AS POLITICIANS 225 

declaration of their wishes as to the "settHng of our 
own and the king's own rights, freedom, peace, and 
safety." This was the first sign of using mihtary 
association for pohtical ends. We are not a mere mer- 
cenary army, they said, but are called forth in defense 
of our own and the people's just rights and liberties. 
We took up arms in judgment and conscience to those 
ends, against all arbitrary power, violence, and oppres- 
sion, and against all particular parties or interests 
whatsoever. These ideas were ripened by Ireton into 
the memorable Heads of the Proposals of the Army, a 
document that in days to come made its influence felt 
in the schemes of government during the Common- 
wealth and the Protectorate. 

In these discussions in the autumn of 1647, j^^st as\ 
the Levelers anticipate Rousseau, so do Oliver and / 
Ireton recall Burke. After all, these are only the two \ 
eternal voices in revolutions, the standing antagonisms . 
through history between the natural man and social^' 
order. In October the mutinous section of the army 
presented to the council a couple of documents, the 
Case of the Army Stated and an Agreement of the 
People — a title that was also given as I have said, to 
a document of Lilburne's at the end of 1648, and to 
one of Ireton's at the beginning of 1649. Here they 
set down the military grievances of the army in the 
first place, and in the second they set out the details 
of a plan of government resting upon the supreme au- 
thority of a House of Commons chosen by universal 
suffrage, and in spirit and in detail essentially repub- 
lican. This was the strange and formidable phantom 
that now rose up before men who had set out on their 
voyage with Pym and Hampden. If we think that 
the headsman at Whitehall is now little more than a 
year off, what followed is just as startling. Ireton 

IS 



226 OLIVER CROMWELL 

at once declared that he did not seek, and would not 
act with those who sought, the destruction either of 
Parliament or king. Cromwell, taking the same line, 
was more guarded and persuasive. "The pretensions 
and the expressions in your constitutions," he said, 
"are very plausible, and if we could jump clean out of 
one sort of government into another, it is just possible 
there would not have been much dispute. But is this 
jump so easy? How do we know that other people 
may not put together a constitution as plausible as 
yours? . . . Even if this were the only plan pro- 
posed, you must consider not only its consequences, 
but the ways and means of accomplishing it. Accord- 
ing to reason and judgment, were the spirits and tem- 
per of the people of this nation prepared to receive and 
to go along with it?" If he could see likelihood of 
visible popular support he would be satisfied, for, adds 
Oliver, in a sentence that might have come straight 
out of Burke, "In the government of nations, that 
which is to be looked after is the affections of the 
people." 

Oliver said something about their being bound by 
certain engagements and obligations to which previous 
declarations had committed them with the public. "It 
may be true enough," cried Wildman, one of the 
Ultras, "that God protects men in keeping honest 
promises, but every promise must be considered after- 
ward, when you are pressed to keep it, whether it was 
honest or just, or not. If it be not a just engagement, 
then it is a plain act of honesty for the man who has 
made it to recede from his former judgment and to 
abhor it." This slippery sophistry, so much in the 
vein of King Charles himself, brought Ireton swiftly 
to his feet with a clean and rapid debating point. 
"You tell us," he said, "that an engagement is only 



THE OFFICERS AS POLITICIANS 227 

binding so far as you think it honest; yet the pith of 
your case against the Parhament is that in ten points 
it has violated engagements." 

In a great heat Rainborough, hkewise an Uhra, fol- 
lowed. You talk of the danger of divisions, but if 
things are honest, why should they divide us? You 
talk of difficulties, but rt difficulties be all, how was it 
that we ever began the war, or dared to look an enemy 
in the face? You talk of innovation upon the old 
laws which made us a kingdom from old time. "But 
if writings be true, there hath been many scufflings 
between the honest men of England and those that 
have tyrannised over them ; and if people find that old 
lavv^s do not suit freemen as they are, what reason can 
exist why old laws should not be changed to new?" 

According to the want of debate, Rainborough's heat 
kindled Cromwell. His stroke is not as clean as Ire- 
ton's, but there is in his words a glow of the sort that 
goes deeper than the sharpest dialectic. After a rather 
cumbrous effort to state the general case for opportun- 
ism, he closes in the manner of a famous word of 
Danton's, with a passionate declaration against divi- 
sions : "Rather than I would have this kingdom break 
in pieces before some company of men be united to- 
gether to a settlement., I will withdraw myself from the 
army to-morrow and lay down my commission ; I will 
perish before I hinder it." 

Colonel Goffe then proposed that there should be a 
public prayer-meeting, and it was agreed that the 
morning of the next day should be given to prayer, and 
the afternoon to business. The lull, edifying as it 
w^as, did not last. No storms are ever harder to allay 
than those that spring up in abstract discussions. 
Wildman returned to the charge with law of nature, 
and the paramount claim of the people's rights and 



228 OLIVER CROMWELL 

liberties over all engagements and over all authority. 
Hereupon Ireton flamed out just as Burke might have 
flamed out : "There is venom and poison in all this. I 
know of no other foundation of right and justice but 
that we should keep covenant with one another. 
Covenants freely entered into must be kept. Take 
that away, and what right has a man to anything — to 
his estate of lands or to his goods? You talk of law 
of nature! By the law of nature you have no more 
right to this land or anything else than I have." 

Here the shrewd man who is a figure in all public 
meetings, ancient and modern, who has no relish for 
general argument, broke in with the apt remark that if 
they went on no quicker with their business, the king 
would come and say who should be hanged first. Ire- 
ton, however, always was a man of the last word, and 
he stood to his point with acuteness and fluency, but 
too much in the vein styled academic. He turns to 
the question that was to give so much fuel to contro- 
versy for a hundred years to come — what obedience 
men owe to constituted authority. Cromwell's con- 
clusion marked his usual urgency for unity, but he 
stated it with an uncompromising breadth that is both 
new and extremely striking. For his part, he was 
anxious that nobody should suppose that he and his 
friends were wedded and glued to forms of govern- 
ment. He wished them to understand that he was not 
committed to any principle of legislative power outside 
the Commons of the kingdom or to any other doctrine 
than that the foundation and supremacy is in the peo- 
ple. With that vain cry so often heard through his- 
tory from Pericles downward, from the political 
leader to the roaring winds and waves of party passion, 
he appeals to them not to meet as two contrary parties, 
but as men desirous to satisfy each other. This is the 



From the portrait by William Dobson at Hincbinbrook House, 
by permission of the Earl of Sandwich. 

GENERAL HENRY IRETON. 



THE OFFICERS AS POLITICIANS 229 

clue to Cromwell. Only unity could save them from 
the tremendous forces ranged against them all ; divi- 
sion must destroy them. Rather than imperil unity, he 
would go over with the whole of his strength to the 
extreme men in his camp, even though he might not 
think their way the best. The army was the one thing 
now left standing. The church was shattered. Par- 
liament was paralyzed. Against the king Cromwell 
had now written in his heart the judgment written of 
old on the wall against Belshazzar. If the army broke, 
then no anchor would hold, and once and for all the 
cause was lost. 

The next day the prayer-meeting had cleared the air. 
After some civil words between Cromwell and Rain- 
borough, Ireton made them another eloquent speech, 
w'here, among many other things, he lays bare the 
spiritual basis on which powerful and upright men like 
Cromwell rested practical policy. Some may now be 
shocked, as w'ere many at that day, by the assumption 
that little transient events are the true measure of the 
divine purpose. Others may feel the full force of all 
the standing arguments ever since Lucretius, that the 
nature of the higher powers is too far above mortal 
things to be either pleased or angry wdth us.^ History 
is only intelligible if w-e place ourselves at the point of 
view of the actor who makes it. Ireton moving clean 
away from the position that he had taken up the day 
before, as if Oliver had w^restled with him in the inter- 
vening night, now goes on : "It is not to me so much as 
the vainest or slightest thing you can imagine, whether 
there be a king in England or no, or whether there be 
lords in England or no. For whatever I find the work 
of God tending to, I should quietly submit to it. If God 
saw it good to destroy not only kings and lords, but all 

iNec bene promeritis capitur, nee tangitur ira, ii. 651. 



230 OLIVER CROMWELL 

distinctions of degrees — nay, if it go further, to de- 
stroy all property — if I see the hand of God in it, I 
hope I shall with quietness acquiesce and submit to it 
and not resist it." In other words, do not persuade 
him that Heaven is with the Levelers, and he turns 
Leveler himself. Ireton was an able and whole- 
hearted man, but we can see how his doctrine might 
offer a decorous mask to the hypocrite and the waiter 
upon Providence. 

Colonel Goffe told them that he had been kept awake 
a long while in the night by certain thoughts, and he 
felt a weight upon his spirit until he had imparted 
them. They turned much upon antichrist, and upon 
the passage in the Book of Revelation which describes 
how the kings of the earth have given up their powers 
to the Beast, as in sooth the kings of the earth have 
given up their powers to the Pope. Nobody followed 
Goffe into these high concerns, but they speedily set to 
work upon the casual questions, so familiar to our- 
selves, of electoral franchise and re-distribution of seats 
— and these two for that matter have sometimes hidden 
a mystery of iniquity of their own. 

"Is the meaning of your proposal," said Ireton. 
"that every man is to have an equal voice in the elec- 
tion of representors?" "Yes," replied Rainborough ; 
''the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live 
as much as the greatest he, and a man is not bound to 
a government that he has not had a voice to put himself 
under." Then the lawyer rose up in Ireton. "So you 
stand," he says, "not on civil right but on natural 
right, and, for my part, I think that no right at all. 
Nobody has a right to a share in disposing the affairs 
of this kingdom unless he has a permanent fixed in- 
terest in the kingdom." "But I find nothing in the 
law of God," Rainborough retorts, "that a lord shall 



THE OFFICERS AS POLITICIANS 231 

choose twenty burgesses, and a gentleman only two, 
and a poor man none. Why did Ahnighty God give 
men reason, if they should not use it in a voting way, 
unless they have an estate of forty shillings a year?" 
"But then," says Ireton, "if you are on natural right, 
show me what difference lies between a right to vote 
and a right to subsistence." "Every man is naturally 
free," cries one. "How comes it," cries another, "that 
one free-born Englishman has property and his neigh- 
bor has none? Why has not a younger son as much 
right in the inheritance as the eldest?" So the modern 
reader finds himself in the thick of controversies 
that have shaken the world from that far-off day to 
this. 

In such a crisis as that upon which England was 
now entering, it is not the sounder reasoning that de- 
cides ; it is passions, interests, outside events, and that 
something vague, undefined, curious almost to mys- 
tery, that in bodies of men is called political instinct. 
All these things together seemed to sweep Cromwell 
and Ireton off their feet. The Levelers beat them, as 
Cromwell would assuredly have foreseen must happen, 
if he had enjoyed modern experiences of the law of 
revolutionary storms. Manhood suffrage was carried, 
though Cromwell had been against it as "tending very 
much to anarchy," and though Ireton had pressed to 
the uttermost the necessity of limiting the vote to men 
with fixed interests. Cromwell now said that he was 
not glued to any particular form of government. Only 
a fortnight before he had told the House of Commons 
that it was matter of urgency to restore the authority 
of monarchy, and Ireton had told the council of the 
army that there must be king and lords in any scheme 
that would do for him. In July Cromwell had called 
out that the question is what is good for the people. 



232 OLIVER CROMWELL 

not what pleases them. Now he raises the balancing 
consideration that if you do not build the fabric of gov- 
ernment on consent it will not stand. Therefore you 
must think of what pleases people, or else they will not 
endure what is good for them. "If I could see a vis- 
ible presence of the people, either by subscription or by 
numbers, that would satisfy me." Cromwell now 
(November) says that if they were free to do as they 
pleased they would set up neither king nor lords. 
Further, they would not keep either king or lords, if to 
do so were a danger to the public interest. Was it a 
danger? Some thought so, others thought not. For 
his own part, he concurred with those who believed 
that there could be no safety with a king and lords, and 
even concurred with them in thinking that God would 
probably destroy them; yet "God can do it without 
necessitating us to a thing which is scandalous, and 
therefore let those that are of that mind wait upon God 
for such a way where the thing may be done without 
sin and without scandal too." 

This was undoubtedly a remarkable change of 
Oliver's mind, and the balanced, hesitating phrases in 
which it is expressed hardly seem to fit a conclusion 
so momentous. A man who, even with profound sin- 
cerity, sets out shifting conclusions of policy in the 
language of unction, must take the consequences, in- 
cluding the chance of being suspected of duplicity by 
embittered adversaries. These weeks must have been 
to Oliver the most poignant hours of the whole strug- 
gle, and more than ever he must have felt the looming 
hazards of his own maxim that "in yielding there is 
wisdom." 



CHAPTER IV 



THE KINGS FLIGHT 



THE Strain of things had now become too intense to 
continue. On the evening of the day when Harri- 
son was declaiming- against the man of blood ( Novem- 
ber 1 1 ) , the king disappeared from Hampton Court. 
That his life was in peril from some of the more vio- 
lent of the soldiers at Putney half a dozen miles away, 
there can be no doubt, though circumstantial stories of 
plots for his assassination do not seem to be proved. 
Cromwell wrote to Whalley, who had the king under 
his guard, that rumors were abroad of an attempt upon 
the king's life, and if any such thing should be done it 
would be accounted a most horrid act. The story that 
Cromwell cunningly frightened Charles away, in order 
to make his own manoeuvers run smoother, was long a 
popular belief, but all the probabilities are decisively 
against it. Even at that eleventh hour, as we see from 
his language a few days before the king's flight, Crom- 
well had no faith that a settlement was possible with- 
out the king, little as he could have hoped from any 
settlement made with him. Whither could it have 
been for Cromwell's interest that the king should be- 
take himself? Not to London, where a Royalist tide 
was flowing pretty strongly. Still less toward the 
Scottish border, where Charles would begin a new civil 
war in a position most favorable to himself. Flight 

233 



234 OLIVER CROMWELL 

to France was the only move on the king's part that 
might have mended Cromwell's situation. He could 
have done no more effective mischief from France than 
the queen had done ; on the other hand, his flight would 
have been treated as an abdication, with as convenient 
results as followed one and forty years later from the 
flight of James IL 

We now know that Charles fled from Hampton 
Court because he had been told by the Scottish envoys, 
with whom he was then secretly dealing, as well as 
from other quarters, that his life was in danger, but 
without any more fixed designs than when he had 
fled from Oxford in April of the previous year. He 
seems to have arranged to take ship from South- 
ampton Water, but the vessel never came, and he 
sought refuge in Carisbrooke Castle in the Isle of 
Wight (November 14, 1647). Here he was soon no 
less a prisoner than he had been at Hampton Court. 
As strongly as ever he even now felt he held the win- 
ning cards in his hands. "Sir," he had said to Fair- 
fax after his removal from Holmby, "I have as good 
an interest in the army as you." Nothing had hap- 
pened since then to shake this conviction, and un- 
doubtedly there was in the army, as there was in 
Parliament, in the City, and all other considerable 
aggregates of the population, a lively and definite hope 
that royal authority would be restored. Beyond all 
this, Charles confidently anticipated that he could rely 
upon the military force of the counter-revolution in 
Scotland. 

Cromwell knew all these favoring chances as vividly 
as the king himself, and he knew better than Charles 
the terrible perils of jealousy and dissension in the only 
force upon which the cause could rely. ''For many 
months," says Fairfax, "all public councils were turned 



THE KING'S FLIGHT 235 

into private juntos, which begot greater emulations 
and jealousies among them." Cromwell was the 
object of attack from many sides. He was accused of 
boldly avowing such noxious principles as these : that 
every single man is judge of what is just and right as 
to the good and ill of a kingdom ; that the interest of 
the kingdom is the interest of the honest men in it, and 
those only are honest men who go with him ; that it is 
lawful to pass through any forms of government for 
the accomplishment of his ends; that it is lawful to 
play the knave with a knave. This about the knave 
was only Cromwell's blunt way of putting the scrip- 
tural admonition to be wise as serpents, or Bacon's 
saying that the wise man must use the good and guard 
himself against the wicked. He was, surrounded by 
danger. He knew that he was himself in danger of 
impeachment, and he had heard for the first time 
of one of those designs for his own assassination, of 
which he was to know so much more in days to come. 
He had been for five years at too close quarters with 
death in many dire shapes to quail at the thought of 
it any more than King Charles quailed. 

Cromwell in later days described 1648 as the most 
memorable year that the nation ever saw. "So many 
insurrections, invasions, secret designs, open and pub- 
lic attempts, all quashed, in so short a time, and this by 
the very signal appearance of God himself." The first 
effect, he says, was to prepare for bringing offenders 
to punishment and for a change of government ; but 
the great thing was "the climax of the treaty with the 
king, whereby they would have put into his hands all 
that we had engaged for, and all our security should 
have been a little piece of paper." Dangers both seen 
and unseen rapidly thickened. The king, while re- 
fusing his assent to a new set of propositions tendered 



236 ' OLIVER CROMWELL 

to him by the ParHament, had secretly entered into an 
engagement with commissioners from the Scots (De- 
cember 26, 1647). Here we have one of the cardinal 
incidents of the struggle, like the case of the Five 
Members, or the closing of the negotiations with 
Cromwell. By this sinister instrument, the Scots de- 
claring against the unjust proceedings of the English 
houses, were to send an army into England for the 
preservation and establishment of religion, and the 
restoration of all the rights and revenues of the crown. 
In return the king was to guarantee Presbytery in 
England for three years, with liberty to himself to use 
his own form of divine service ; but the opinions and 
practices of the Independents were to be suppressed. 
That is, Presbyterian Scot and English Royalist were 
to join in arms against the Parliament, on the basis of 
the restoration of the king's claims, the suppression of 
Sectaries, and the establishment of Presbytery for 
three years and no longer, unless the king should 
agree to an extension of the time. This clandestine 
covenant for kindling afresh the flames of civil war 
was wrapped up in lead, and buried in the garden at 
Carisbrooke. 

The secret must have been speedily guessed. 
Little more than a week after the treaty had been 
signed, a proposal was made in the Commons to im- 
peach the king, and Cromwell supported it (not neces- 
sarily intending more than deposition) on the ground 
that the king, "while he professed with all solemnity 
that he referred himself wholly to the Parliament, had 
at the same time secret treaties with the Scots com- 
missioners how he might embroil the nation in a new 
war and destroy the Parliament." Impeachment was 
dropped, but a motion was carried against holding 
further communications with the king (January, 




From a print in the British Museum. 
SIR MARMADUKE LANGDALE, FIRST LORD LAXGDALE. 



THE KL^G'S FLIGHT 237 

1648), thus in substance and for the time openly bring- 
ing monarchy to an end. From the end of 1647, ^^^^ 
all through 1648, designs for bringing the king to jus- 
tice which had long existed among a few of the ex- 
treme agitators, extended to the leading officers. The 
committee of both kingdoms, in which Scots and Eng- 
lish had united for executive purposes, was at once 
dissolved, and the new executive body, now exclusively 
English, found itself confronted by Scotland, Ireland, 
and Wales, all in active hostility, and by an England 
smoldering in various different stages of disaffec- 
tion. A portion of the fleet was already in revolt, and 
no one knew how far the mutiny might go. All must 
depend upon the army, and for the Presbyterian party 
the success of the army would be the victory of a 
master and an enemy. 

At the moment of the flight to Carisbrooke, Crom- 
well had sternly stamped out an incipient revolt. At 
a rendezvous near Ware two regiments appeared on 
the field without leave, and bearing disorderly ensigns 
in their hats. Cromwell rode among them, bade them 
remove the mutinous symbol, arrested the ringleaders 
of those who refused to obey, and after a drumhead 
court-martial at which three of the offenders were con- 
demned to death, ordered the three to throw dice for 
their lives, and he who lost was instantly shot ( Novem- 
ber 15, 1647). Though not more formidable than a 
breakdown of military discipline must have proved, 
the political difficulties were much less simple to deal 
with. Cromwell had definitely given up all hope of 
coming to terms with the king. On the other hand he 
was never a Republican himself, and his sagacity told 
him that the country would never accept a government 
founded on what to him were Republican chimeras. 
Every moment the tide of reaction was rising. From 



238 OLIVER CROMWELL 

Christmas (1647) ^^^^ ^^^ through the spring there 
were unmistakable signs of popular discontent. Puri- 
tan suppression of old merrymakings was growing too 
hard to bear, for the old x\dam was not yet driven out 
of the free-born Englishman by either law or gospel. 
None of the sections into which opinion was divided 
had confidence in the Parliament. The rumors of 
bringing the king to trial and founding a military re- 
public, perturbed many and incensed most in every 
class. Violent riots broke out in the City. In the 
home counties disorderly crowds shouted for God and 
King Charles. Royalist risings were planned in half 
the counties in England, north, west, south, and even 
east. The Royalist press was active and audacious. 
In South Wales the royal standard had been unfurled, 
the population eagerly rallied to it, and the strong- 
places were in Royalist hands. In Scotland Hamilton 
had got the best of Argyll and the Covenanting Ultras, 
in spite of the bitter and tenacious resistance of the 
clergy to every design for supporting a sovereign who 
was champion of Episcopacy ; and in April the Parlia- 
ment at Edinburgh had ordered an army to be raised 
to defend the king and the Covenant. In face of pub- 
lic difficulties so overwhelming, Cromwell was person- 
ally weakened by the deep discredit into which he had 
fallen among the zealots in his own camp, as the result 
of his barren attempt to bring the king to reason. Of 
all the dark moments of his life this was perhaps the 
darkest. 

He tried a sociable conference between the two 
ecclesiastical factions, including laymen and ministers 
of each, but each went away as stiff and as high as 
they had come. Then he tried a conference between 
the leading men of the army and the extreme men of 
the Commonwealth, and they had a fruitless argument 



THE KING'S FLIGHT 239 

on the hoary theme, dating ahnost from the birth of 
the western world, of the relative merits of monarchy, 
aristocracy, and democracy. Cromwell wisely de- 
clined to answer this threadbare riddle, only maintain- 
ing that any form of government might be good in 
itself or for us, "according as Providence should di- 
rect us" — the formula of mystic days for modern 
opportunism. The others replied by passages from 
the first book of Samuel, from Kings, and Judges. We 
cannot wonder that Cromwell, thinking of the ruin 
that he saw hanging imminent in thunder-clouds over 
cause and kingdom, at last impatiently ended the idle 
talk by flinging a cushion at Ludlow's head and run- 
ning off down the stairs. 

What was called the second civil war was now in- 
evitable. The curtain was rising for the last, most 
dubious, most exciting, and most memorable act of the 
long drama in which Charles had played his leading 
and ill-starred part. Even in the army men were "in 
a low, weak, divided, perplexed condition." Some 
were so depressed by the refusal of the nation to follow 
their intentions for its good, that they even thought of 
laying down their arms and returning- to private life. 
Thus distracted and cast down, their deep mystic faith 
drew them to the oracles of prayer, and at Windsor in 
April they began their solemn office, searching out 
what iniquities of theirs had provoked the Lord of 
Hosts to bring down such grievous perplexities upon 
them. Cromw^ell was among the most fervid, and 
again and again they all melted in bitter tears. Their 
sin was borne home to them. They had turned aside 
from the path of simplicity, and stepped, to their hurt, 
into the paths of policy. The root of the evil was 
found out in those cursed carnal conferences with the 
king and his party, to which their own conceited wis- 



240 OLIVER CROMWELL 

dom and want of faith had prompted them the year 
before. And so, after the meeting had lasted for three 
whole days, with prayer, exhortations, preaching, 
seeking, groans, and weeping, they came without a 
dissenting voice to an agreement that it was the duty 
of the day to go out and fight against those potent ene- 
mies rising on every hand against them, and then it 
would be their further duty, if ever the Lord should 
bring them back in peace, to call Charles Stuart, that 
man of blood, to an account for all the blood that he 
had shed, and all the mischief he had done against the 
Lord's cause and people in these poor nations. When 
this vehement hour of exaltation had passed away, 
many of the warlike saints, we may be sure, including 
Oliver himself, admitted back into their minds some of 
those politic misgivings for which they had just shown 
such passionate contrition. But to the great majority 
it was the inspiration of the Windsor meetings, and the 
directness and simplicity of their conclusion, that gave 
such fiery energy to the approaching campaign, and 
kept alive the fierce resolve to exact retribution to the 
uttermost when the time appointed should bring the 
arch-delinquent within their grasp. 



CHAPTER V 

SECOND CIVIL WAR CROMWELL AT PRESTON 

EVEN as the hour of doom drew steadily nearer, 
the prisoner at Carisbrooke might well believe 
that the rebels and traitors were hastening to their 
ruin. The political paradox grew more desperate as 
the days went on, and to a paradox Charles looked for 
his deliverance. It is worth examining. The Par- 
liamentary majority hoped for the establishment of 
Presbytery and the restoration of the king, and so did 
the Scottish invaders. Yet the English Presbyterians 
were forced into hostility to the invaders though both 
were declared Covenanters, because Scottish victory 
would mean the defeat of the Parliament. The Scot- 
tish Presbyterians were hostile or doubtful, because 
they found their army in incongruous alliance with 
English cavaliers. The Scots under Hamilton were 
to fight for the Covenant ; their English confederates, 
under Langdale, were openly fighting for the antago- 
nistic cause of church and king, and refused point- 
blank to touch the Covenant. If the Scotch invaders 
should win, they would win with the aid of purely 
Royalist support in the field, and purely Royalist sym- 
pathy in the nation. The day on which they should 
enter London would be the day of unqualified triumph 
for the king, of humiliation for the English Parlia- 
ment, and of final defeat both for the great cause and 
i6 241 



242 OLIVER CROMWELL 

the brave men who for nearly twenty years had toiled 
and bled for it. For whose sake, then, was the Pres- 
byterian Royalist at Westminster to fast and pray ? It 
was the sorest dilemma of his life. 

If this was the supreme crisis of the rebellion, it 
was the supreme moment for Cromwell. On May i, 
1648, by order of Fairfax and the council of war, he 
rode off to South Wales to take command of the Par- 
liamentary forces there. He carried in his breast the 
unquenched assurance that he went forth like Moses or 
like Joshua, the instrument of the purposes of the Most 
High ; but it was not in his temperament to forget that 
he might peradventure be misreading the divine coun- 
sels, and well he knew that if his confidence were not 
made good, he was leaving relentless foes in the Parlia- 
ment behind him, and that if he failed in the hazardous 
duty that had been put upon him, destruction sure and 
unsparing awaited both his person and his cause. 
While Cromwell thus went west, Fairfax himself con- 
ducted a vigorous and decisive campaign in Kent and 
Essex, and then (June 13) sat down before Colchester, 
into which a strong body of Royalists had thrown 
themselves, and where they made a long and stubborn 
defense. Lambert, with a small force, was despatched 
north to meet Langdale and the northern cavaliers, and 
to check the advance of the Scots. Here (July 8) 
Hamilton crossed the border at the head of ten thou- 
sand men, ill equipped and ill trained, but counting on 
others to follow, and on the aid of three thousand 
more under Langdale. Three days later, as it hap- 
pened, Cromwell's operations in Wales came to a suc- 
cessful end with the capture of Pembroke Castle. He 
instantly set his face northward, and by the end of the 
month reached Leicester. The marches were long 
and severe. Shoes and stockings were worn out, pay 



THE SECOND CIVIL WAR 243 

was many months in arrears, plunder was sternly for- 
bidden, and not a few of the gallant warriors tramped 
barefoot from Wales into Yorkshire. With fire in 
their hearts, these tattered veterans carried with them 
the issue of the whole long struggle and the destinies 
of the three kingdoms. The fate of the king, the 
power of Parliament, the future of constitutions, laws, 
and churches, were known to hang upon the account 
which these few thousand men should be able to give 
of the invaders from over the northern border. If the 
Parliament had lost Naseby, the war might still have 
gone on, whereas if Hamilton should now reach Lon- 
don, the king would be master for good. 

It was on August 12th that Cromwell joined Lam- 
bert on the high fells between Leeds and York, the 
united force amounting to some eight thousand men. 
Still uncertain whether his enemy would strike through 
Yorkshire or follow a western line through Lancashire 
and Wales, he planted himself here so as to command 
either course. Scouts brought the intelligence that 
the Scots and Langdale's force, afterward estimated 
by Oliver at twenty-one thousand men, were marching 
southward by way of Lancashire and making for Lon- 
don. As Cromwell knew, to hinder this was life and 
death, and to engage the enemy to fight was his busi- 
ness at all cost. Marching through the Craven 
country down the valley of the Ribble, he groped his 
way until he found himself in touch with the enemy's 
left f^ank at Preston. Hamilton was no soldier : his 
counsels were distracted by jealousy and division, na- 
tional, political, and religious, his scouting was so ill 
done that he did not know that any serious force was 
in his neighborhood; and his line extended over seven 
leagues from north to south, Preston about the center, 
and the van toward Wigan, with the Ribble between 



244 OLIVER CROMWELL 

van and rear. For three days of hard fighting the 
battles, named from Preston, lasted. That they were 
the result of a deliberately preconceived flank attack, 
ingeniously planned from the outset, is no longer be- 
lieved. Things are hardly ever so in war, the military 
critics say. As in politics, Oliver in the field watched 
the progress of events, alert for any chance, and ever 
ready to strike on the instant when he knew that the 
blow would tell. The general idea in what was now 
done was that it would be better to cut off Hamilton 
from Scotland than directly to bar his advance to 
London. 

The first encounter at Preston (x\ugust 17) was the 
hardest, when English fell upon English. For four 
fierce hours Langdale and his north-country Royalists 
offered "a very stiff resistance" to the valor and reso- 
lution of Cromwell's best troops, and at this point the 
Cromwellians were superior in numbers. At last the 
Royalists broke; the survivors scattered north and 
south, and were no more heard of. Next day it was 
the turn of Hamilton and his Scots. With difficulty 
they had got across the Ribble overnight, wet, weary, 
and hungry, and Oliver's troopers were too weary to 
follow them. At daybreak the Scots pressed on, the 
Ironsides at their heels in dogged pursuit, killing and 
taking prisoners all the way, though they were only 
fifty-five hundred foot and horse against twice as 
large a force of Scots. "By night," says Oliver, "we 
were very dirty and weary, having marched twelve 
miles of such ground as I never rode in my life, the 
day being very wet." On the third day (August 19) 
the contest went fiercely forward. At Winwick the 
Scots made a resolute stand for many hours, and for 
a time the English gave way. Then they recovered, 
and chased the Scots three miles into Warrington. 




From the original portrait at Hamilton Palace. 
JAMES, FIRST DUKE OF HAMILTON. 



THE SECOND CIVIL WAR 245 

Hamilton lost heart, and directed Baillie to surrender 
his infantry to Cromwell, while he himself marched 
on with some three thousand horse over the Cheshire 
border into Delamere Forest. "If I had a thousand 
horse," wrote Cromwell, "that could but trot thirty 
miles, I should not doubt but to give a very good ac- 
count of them; but, truly, we are so harassed and 
haggled out in this business that we are not able to do 
more than walk at an easy pace after them. They are 
the miserablest party that ever was ; I durst engage 
myself with five hundred fresh horse and five hundred 
nimble foot, to destroy them all. My horse are mis- 
erably beaten out, and I have ten thousand of them 
prisoners." Hamilton was presently taken (August 
25), and so the first campaign in which Cromwell had 
held an independent command-in-chief came to a glor- 
ious close. When next year Hamilton was put upon 
the trial that ended in the scaffold, he said of Crom- 
well that he was so courteous and civil as to perform 
more than he promised, and that acknowledgment was 
due for his favor to the poor wounded gentlemen that 
were left behind, and by him taken care of, and "truly 
he did perform more than he did capitulate for." 

The military student counts Preston the finest ex- 
ploit of the war, and even pronounces it the mark of 
one of those who are born commanders by the grace 
of God. At least we may say that in the intrepid 
energy of the commander, the fortitude, stoutness, 
and discipline of the men, and the momentous political 
results that hung upon their victory, the three days of 
Preston are among the most famous achievements of 
the time. To complete his task — for he was always 
full of that instinct of practical thoroughness which 
abhors the leaving of a ragged edge — Cromwell again 
turned northward to clear the border of what had been 



246 OLIVER CROMWELL 

the rear of Hamilton's force, to recover the two great 
border strongholds of Berwick and Carlisle, and so to 
compose affairs in Scotland that the same perilous 
work should not need to be done over again. He bar- 
gained with Argyle, who desired nothing better, for 
the exclusion from power of the rival factions of Ham- 
iltonians and English, and left a government of ultra- 
Presbyterians installed, to the scandal of English In- 
dependents, but in fact Cromwell never showed himself 
more characteristically politic. 

The local risings in England had been stamped out 
either by the alertness of the Parliamentary authorities 
on the spot, or by the extraordinary vigor of the Derby 
• House Committee, which was mainly Independent. 
Fairfax never showed himself a belter soldier. The 
City, as important a factor as the Houses themselves, 
and now leaning to the king upon conditions, threat- 
ened trouble from time to time; but opinion wavered, 
and in the end the City made no effective move. The 
absence of political agreement among the various ele- 
ments was reflected in the absence of Royalist con- 
cert. The insurrection in England was too early, 
or else the advance from Scotland was too late. 
By the time when Cromwell was marching through 
the midlands to join Lambert in Yorkshire, the 
dead-weight of the majority of the population, who 
cared more for quiet than for either king or Parlia- 
ment, had for the time put out the scattered fires. 
The old international antipathy revived, and even Roy- 
alists had seen with secret satisfaction the repulse of 
the nation who in their view had sold their king. 

Meanwhile in Parliament the Presbyterians at first 
had not known what to wish, but they were now at no 
loss about what they had to fear. The paradox had 
turned out ill. The invaders had been beaten, but 



THE SECOND CIVIL WAR 247 

then the invaders were of their own persuasion, and 
the victors were the hated Sectaries with toleration 
inscribed upon their banners. The soldier's yoke would 
be more galling than ever, and the authority of Crom- 
well, which had been at its lowest when he set out for 
Wales, would be higher than it had ever been when 
he should come back from Scotland. 

The Lords had become zealous Royalists. They 
would not even join the Commons in describing the in- 
vading Scots as enemies. In both Houses the Presby- 
terians had speedily taken advantage of the absence 
of some of the chief Independents in the field, and were 
defiantly flying the old colors. In the days when 
Oliver was marching with his Ironsides to drive back 
the invasion that would have destroyed them all, the 
Lords regaled themselves by a fierce attack made upon 
the absent Cromwell by one who had been a major of 
his and enjoyed his confidence. The major's version 
of the things that Oliver had said would have made a 
plausible foundation for an impeachment, and at the 
same moment Holies, his bitterest enemy, came back 
to Westminster and took the Presbyterian lead. So 
in the reckless intensity of party hatred the Parliament 
were preparing for the destruction of the only man 
who could save them from the uncovenanted king. 
They were as heated as ever against the odious idea of 
toleration. On the day after the departure of Oliver 
they passed an ordinance actually punishing with death 
any one who should hold or publish not only Atheism, 
but Arianism or Socinianism, and even the leading- 
doctrines of Arminians, Baptists, and harmless Quak- 
ers were made penal. Death was the punishment for 
denying any of the mysteries of the Trinity, or that 
any of the canonical books of Old Testament or New 
is the word of God ; and a dungeon was the punishment 



248 OLIVER CROMWELL 

for holding that the baptism of infants is unlawful and 
void, or that man is bound to believe no more than his 
reason can comprehend. Our heroic Puritan age is 
not without atrocious blots. 

Nevertheless the Parliamentary persecutors were well 
aware that no ordinance of theirs, however savory or 
drastic, would be of any avail unless new power were 
added to their right arm, and this power, as things 
then stood, they could only draw from alliance with 
the king. If they could bring him off from the Isle of 
Wight to London before Oliver and his men could 
return from the north, they might still have a chance. 
They assumed that Charles would see that here too 
,was a chance for him. They failed to discern that 
they had no alternative between surrendering on any 
terms to the king,whose moral authority they could not 
do without, and yielding to the army, whose military 
authority was ready to break them. So little insight 
had they into the heart of the situation, that they took 
a course that exasperated the army, while they per- 
sisted in trying to impose such terms upon the king as 
nobody who knew him could possibly expect him to 
keep. Political incompetency could go no further, and 
the same failure inevitably awaited their designs as had 
befallen Cromwell when, a year before, he had made a 
similar attempt. 

On the day after the news of Oliver's success at 
Warrington the Parliamentary majority repealed the 
vote against further addresses to the king, and then 
hurried on to their proposals for a treaty. The nego- 
tiations opened at Newport in the Isle of Wight on the 
1 8th of September, and were spun out until near the 
end of November. "They who had not seen the 
king," says Clarendon, "for near two years found his 
countenance extremelv altered. From the time that 




From the original portrait in the collection of the Marquis of Lothian, at Newbattle Abbey, Dalkeith. 
ARCHIBALD CAMPBELL, FIRST MARQUIS OF ARGYLL. 



THE SECOND CIVIL WAR 249 

his own servants had been taken from him he would 
never suffer his hair to be cut, nor cared to have any 
new clothes, so that his aspect and appearance was very 
different from what it had used to be; otherwise his 
health was good, and he was much more cheerful in 
his discourses toward all men, than could have been 
imagined after such mortification of all kinds. He 
was not at all dejected in his spirits, but carried himself 
with the same majesty he had used to do. His hair 
was all gray, which, making all others very sad, made 
it thought that he had sorrow in his countenance, 
which appeared only by that shadow." There he sat 
at the head of the council-table, the fifteen commission- 
ers of the Parliament, including Vane and Fiennes, 
the only two men of the Independent wing, seated at a 
little distance below him. Charles showed his usual 
power of acute dialectic, and he conducted the proceed- 
ings with all the cheerfulness, ease, and courtly gravity 
of a fine actor in an ironic play. The old ground of 
the propositions at Uxbridge, at Newcastle, at Oxford, 
at Hampton Court, was once more trodden, with one 
or two new interludes. Charles, even when retreating, 
fought every inch with a tenacity that was the despair 
of men who each hour seemed to hear approaching 
nearer and nearer the clatter of the Cromwellian 
troopers. 

Church government was now as ever the rock on 
which Charles chose that the thing should break off. 
Day after day he insisted on the partition of the apos- 
tolic office between Bishops and Presbyters, cited the 
array of texts from the Epistles, and demonstrated that 
Timothy and Titus were cpiscopi pastoruni, bishops 
over Presbyters, and not episcopi gregis, shepherds 
over sheep. In all this Charles was in his element, 
for he defended tenets that he sincerely counted sacred. 



250 OLIVER CROMWELL 

At length after the distracted Parhament had more 
than once extended the ahotted time, the end came 
(November 27). Charles would agree that Episco- 
pacy should be suspended for three years, and that it 
might be limited, but he would not assent to its abo- 
lition, and he would not assent to an alienation of the 
fee of the church lands. 

A modern student, if he reads the Newport treaty 
as a settlement upon paper, may think that it falls 
little short of the justice of the case. Certainly if the 
parties to it had been acting in good faith, this or 
almost any of the proposed agreements might have 
been workable. As it was, any treaty now made at 
Newport must be the symbol of a new working coali- 
tion between Royalist and Presbyterian, and any such 
coalition was a declaration of w^ar against Indepen- 
dents and army. It was to undo the work of Preston 
and Colchester, to prepare a third sinister outbreak of 
violence and confusion, and to put Cromwell and his 
allies back again upon that sharp and perilous razor- 
edge of fortune from which they had just saved 
themselves. 

It was their own fault again if the Parliament did 
not know^ that Charles, from the first day of the nego- 
tiations to the last, was busily contriving plans for his 
escape from the island. He seems to have nursed a 
wild idea that if he could only find his way to Ireland 
he might, in conjunction with the ships from Holland 
under the command of Rupert, place himself at the 
head of an Irish invasion, with better fortune than had 
attended the recent invasion of the Scots. "The great 
concession I have made to-day," he wrote to a secret 
correspondent, "was merely in order to my escape." 
While publicly forbidding Ormonde to go on in Ireland, 
privately he writes to him not to heed any open com- 



THE SECOND CIVIL WAR 251 

mands until he has word that the king is free from 
restraint; Ormonde should pursue the way he is in 
with all possible vigor, and must not be astonished at 
any published concessions, for "they would come to 
nothing." 

Watching the proceedings with fierce impatience, at 
last the army with startling rapidity brought the 
elusive conflict to a crisis. A week before the close 
of negotiations at Newport, a deputation from Fairfax 
and his general council of officers came up to the house 
as bearers of a great remonstrance. Like all that came 
from the pen of Ireton, it is powerfully argued, and it 
is also marked by his gift of inordinate length. It 
fills nearly fifty pages of the Parliamentary history, 
and could not have been read by a clerk at the table in 
much less than three hours. The points are simple 
enough. First, it would be stupidity rather than 
charity to suppose that the king's concessions arose 
from inward remorse or conviction, and therefore to 
continue to treat with him was both danger and folly. 
Second, he had been guilty of moral and civil acts 
judged capital in his predecessors, and therefore he 
ought to be brought to trial. Other delinquents be- 
sides the king in both wars, ought to be executed, and 
the soldiers ought to have their arrears paid. This 
was the upshot of the document that the body of offi- 
cers, some of whom had capital sentence executed 
upon themselves in days to come, now in respectful 
form presented to the House of Commons. 

The majority in the Commons, with a high spirit 
that was out of all proportion to their power, insisted 
on postponing the consideration of the demands of "a 
council of Sectaries in arms." In fact they never 
would nor did consider them, and the giant remon- 
strance of the army went into the limbo of all the other 



252 OLIVER CROMWELL 

documents in which those times were so marvelously 
fertile. As a presentation of the chfficulties of the 
hour, it is both just and penetrating; but these after 
all were quite as easy to see as they were hard to over- 
come. We usually find a certain amount of practical 
reason even at the bottom of what passes for political 
fanaticism. What Harrison and his allies saw was 
that if king and Parliament agreed, the army would 
be disbanded. If that happened its leaders would be 
destroyed for what they had done already. If not, 
they would be proclaimed as traitors and hinderers of 
the public peace, and destroyed for what they might be 
expected to do. 



CHAPTER VI 



FINAL CRISIS CROMWELL S SHARE IN IT 

IT is one of the mortifications of Cromwell's history 
that we are unable accurately to trace his share in 
the events that immediately preceded the trial of the 
king. It was the most critical act of his history. Yet 
at nearly every turn in the incidents that prepared it, 
the diligent incjuirer is forced to confess that there is 
little evidence to settle what was the precise part that 
Cromwell played. This deep reserve and impenetrable 
obscurity was undoubtedly one of the elements of his 
reputation for craft and dissimulation. If they do not 
read a public man in an open page, men are easily 
tempted to suspect the worst. 

When the negotiations were opened at Newport 
Cromwell was on his march into Scotland. He did 
not return until the later days of October, when the 
army and its leaders had grown uncontrollably restive 
at the slow and tortuous course of the dealings between 
the king and the commissioners of the Parliament. 
Cromwell had thus been absent from Westminster for 
six months, since the time of his first despatch to put 
down the Royalist rising in Wales. The stress of 
actual war had only deepened the exasperation with 
which he had watched the gathering clouds, and which 
had found expression in the fierce language at the 
memorable prayer-meeting at Windsor. All this, 

253 



254 OLIVER CROMWELL 

however, is a long way from the decision that events 
were hurrying on, and from which more rapid and less 
apprehensive minds than his had long ceased to shrink. 
With what eyes he watched the new approaches to the 
king, he showed in a letter to the Speaker. After giv- 
ing his report as a soldier, and showing that affairs in 
Scotland were in a thriving posture, he advances (Oc- 
tober 9) on to other ground, and uses ominous lan- 
guage about "the treachery of some in England, who 
had endangered the whole state and kingdom of Eng- 
land, and who now had cause to blush," in spite of all 
the religious pretences by which they had masked their 
proceedings. This could only mean his Presbyterian 
opponents. "But God, who is not to be mocked or 
deceived, and is very jealous when his name and reli- 
gion are made use of to carry on impious designs, has 
taken vengeance on such profanity, even to astonish- 
ment and admiration. And I wish, from the bottom 
of my heart, it may cause all to tremble and repent who 
have practised the like, to the blasphemy of his name 
and the destruction of his people, so as they may never 
presume to do the like again, and I think it is not 
unseasonable for me to take the humble boldness to 
say thus much at this time." 

Writing to Colonel Hammond (November 6), the 
custodian of the king, a month later from before the 
frowning walls of Pontefract Castle, Cromwell 
smiles in good-humored ridicule at the notion that it 
would be as safe to expect a good peace from a settle- 
ment on the base of moderate Episcopacy as of Pres- 
bytery. At the same time he vindicates his own Pres- 
byterian settlement in Scotland, throwing out his 
guiding principle in a parenthesis of characteristic 
fervor and sincerity. "I profess to thee I desire from 
my heart, I have prayed for it, I have waited for the 



THE FINAL CRISIS 255 

day to see union and right understanding between the 
godly people — Scots, EngHsh, Jews, Gentiles, Presby- 
terians, Independents, Anabaptists, and alL" Still if the 
king could have looked over Hammond's shoulder as 
he read Cromwell's letter, he would not have seen a sin- 
gle word pointing to the terrible fate that was now 
so swiftly closing upon him. He would have seen 
nothing more formidable than a suggestion that the 
best course might be to break the sitting Parliament 
and call a new one. To Charles this would have little 
terror, for he might vv^ell believe that no Parliament 
could possibly be called under which his life would be 
put in peril. 

A few days later Cromwell gave signs of rising 
anger in a letter to two members of Parliament, who 
inclined to lenient courses toward delinquents. "Did 
not the House," he asks, "vote every man a traitor who 
sided with the Scots in their late invasion? And not 
without very clear justice, this being a more prodigious 
treason than any that hath been perfected in England 
before, because the former quarrel was that English- 
men might rule over one another, this to vassalise its to 
a foreign nation." Here was the sting, for we have 
never to forget that Oliver, like Milton, was ever Eng- 
lish of the English. Then follow some ominous hints, 
though he still rather reports the mind of others than 
makes plain his own. "Give me leave to tell you, I 
find a sense among the officers concerning such things 
as the treatment of these men to amazement, which 
truly is not so much to see their blood made so cheap 
as to see such manifest witnessings of God, so terrible 
and so just, no more reverenced." 

To Fairfax on the same day he writes in the same 
tone that he finds in the officers a very great sense of 
the sufferings of the kingdom, and a very great zeal 



256 OLIVER CROMWELL 

to have impartial justice done upon offenders. "And 
I must confess," he adds, striking for the first time a 
new and dangerous note of his own, "I do in all from 
my heart concur with them, and I verily think, and am 
persuaded, they are things which God puts into our 
hearts." But he still moves very slowly, and follows 
rather than leads. 

Finally he writes once more to Hammond on 
November 25th one of the most remarkable of all the 
letters he ever wrote. That worthy soldier had 
groaned under the burdens and misgivings of his posi- 
tion. ''Such talk as this," says Cromwell, "such 
words as heavy, sad, pleasant, easy, are but the snares 
of fleshly reasonings. Call not your burdens sad or 
heavy; it is laid on you by One from whom comes 
every good and perfect gift, being for the exercise of 
faith and patience, whereby in the end we shall be made 
perfect. Seek rather whether there be not some high 
and glorious meaning in all that chain of Providence 
which brought that person [the king] to thee, and be 
sure that this purpose can never be the exaltation of 
the wicked." From this strain of devout stoicism he 
turns to the policy of the hour. 

Hammond was doubtful about the acts and aims of 
the extreme men as respects both king and Parlia- 
ment. "It is true, as you say," Cromwell replies, "that 
authorities and powers are the ordinance of God, and 
that in England authority and power reside in the Par- 
liament. But these authorities may not do what they 
like, and still demand our obedience. All agree that 
there are cases in which it is lawful to resist. Is ours 
such a case? This, frankly, is the true question." 
Then he produces three considerations, as if he were 
revolving over again the arguments that were turning 
his own mind. First, is it sound to stand on safety 



THE FINAL CRISIS 257 

of the people as the supreme law? Second, will the 
treaty between king and Parliament secure the safety 
of the people, or will it not frustrate the whole fruit 
of the war and bring back all to what it was, and 
worse? Third, is it not possible that the army, too, 
may be a lav/ful power, ordained by God to fight the 
king on stated grounds, and that the army may resist 
on the same grounds one name of authority, the Par- 
liament, as well as the other authority, the king? 

Then he suddenly is dissatisfied with his three argu- 
ments. "Truly," he cries, "this kind of reasoning 
may be but fleshly, either with or against, only it is 
good to try what truth may be in them." Cromwell's 
understanding was far too powerful not to perceive 
that saliis popiili and the rest of it would serve just as 
well for Strafford or for Charles as it served for Ireton 
and the army, and that usurpation by troopers must be 
neither more nor less hard to justify in principle than 
usurpation by a king. So he falls back on the simpler 
ground of "providences," always his favorite strong- 
hold. "They hang so together, have been so constant, 
clear, unclouded." Was it possible that the same Lord 
who had been with his people in all their victorious 
actings was not with them in that steady and unmis- 
takable growth of opinion about the present crisis, of 
which Hammond is so much afraid? "You speak of 
tempting God. There are two ways of this. Action 
in presumptuous and carnal confidence is one ; action in 
unbelief through diffidence is the other." Though 
difficulties confronted them, the more the difficulties 
the more the faith. 

From the point of a modern's carnal reasoning all 
this has a thoroughly sophistic flavor, and it leaves a 
doubt of its actual weight in Oliver's own mind at the 
moment. Nor was his mind really made up on inde- 

17 



258 OLIVER CROMWELL 

pendent grounds, for he goes on to say plainly that 
they in the northern army were in a waiting posture. 
It was not until the southern army put out its remon- 
strance that they changed. After that many were 
shaken. "IVe could, perhaps, have wished the stay of 
it till after the treaty, yet, seeing it is come out, we 
trust to rejoice in the will of the Lord, waiting his 
further pleasure." This can only mean that Ireton 
and his party were pressing forward of their own will, 
and without impulse from Cromwell at Pontefract. 
Yet it is equally evident that he did not disapprove. 
In concluding the letter he denounces the treaty of 
Newport as a "ruining, hypocritical agreement," and 
remonstrates with those of their friends who expect 
good from Charles — "good by this Man, against whom 
the Lord hath witnessed, and whom thou knowest !" 

A writer of a hostile school has remarked in this 
memorable letter "its cautious obscurity, shadowy sig- 
nificance ; its suavity, tenderness, subtlety ; the way in 
which he alludes to more than he mentions, suggests 
more than pronounces his own argumentative inten- 
tion, and opens an indefinite view, all the hard fea- 
tures of which he softly puts aside" (J. B. Mozley). 
Quite true ; but what if this be the real Cromwell, and 
represents the literal working of his own habit and 
temper ? 

When this letter reached the Isle of Wight, Ham- 
mond was no longer there. The army had made up 
their minds to act, and the blow had fallen. The fate 
of the king was sealed. In this decision there is no 
evidence that Cromwell had any share. His letter 
to Hammond is our last glimpse of him, and from 
that and the rest the sounder conclusion seems to be 
that even yet he would fain have gone slow, but was 
forced to go fast. Charles might possibly even at the 



THE FINAL CRISIS 259 

eleventh hour have made his escape, but he still nursed 
the illusion that the army could not crush the Parlia- 
ment without him. He had, moreover, given his 
parole. When reminded that he had given it not to 
the army but to the Parliament, his somber pride for 
once withstood a sophism. At break of the winter 
day (December i) a body of officers broke into his 
chamber, put him into a coach, conducted him to the 
coast, and then transported him across the Solent to 
Hurst Castle, a desolate and narrow blockhouse stand- 
ing at the edge of a shingly spit on the Hampshire 
shore. In those dreary quarters he remained a fort- 
night. The last scene was now rapidly approaching of 
the desperate drama in which every one of the actors — 
king. Parliament, army, Cromwell — was engaged in a 
death struggle with an implacable necessity. 

At Westminster, meanwhile, futile proceedings in the 
House of Commons had been brought to a rude close. 
The House resolved by a large majority once more 
( November 30) not to consider the army remon- 
strance, and the army promptly replied by marching 
into London two days after (December 2). Two 
days after that the House, with a long and very sharp 
discussion, put upon record a protest against the forci- 
ble removal of the king without their knowledge or 
consent. They then proceeded to debate the king's 
answers to their commissioners at the Isle of Wight. 
A motion was made that the answers should be ac- 
cepted, but the motion finally carried was in the weak- 
ened and dilatory form that the answers "were a 
ground for the House to proceed upon for the settle- 
ment of the peace of the kingdom" (December 5). 
This was the final provocation to the soldiers. The 
same afternoon a full consultation took place between 
some of the principal officers of the army and a num- 



260 OLIVER CROMWELL 

ber of members of Parliament. One side were for 
forcible dissolution, as Cromwell had at one time been 
for it; the other were for the less sweeping measure 
of a partial purge. A committee of three members 
of the House and three officers of the army was or- 
dered to settle the means for putting a stop to proceed- 
ings in Parliament, that were nothing less than a for- 
feiture of its trust. These six agreed that the army 
should be drawn out next morning, and guards placed 
in Westminster Hall and the lobby, that "none might 
be permitted to pass into the house but such as had 
continued faithful to the public interest." At seven 
o'clock next morning (December 6) Colonel Pride 
was at his post in the lobby, and before night one hun- 
dred and forty-three members had either been locked 
up or forcibly turned back from the doors of the House 
of Commons. The same night Cromwell returned 
from Yorkshire and lay at Whitehall, where Fairfax 
already was, I suppose for the first time. "There," 
says Ludlow, "and at other places, Cromwell declared 
that he had not been acquainted with this design, yet, 
since it was done, he was glad of it and would endeavor 
to maintain it." 

The process was completed next day. A week later 
(December 15) the council of officers determined 
that Charles should be brought to Windsor, and Fair- 
fax sent orders accordingly. In the depth of the win- 
ter night the king in the desolate keep on the sea- 
shingle heard the clanking of the drawbridge, and at 
daybreak he learned that the redoubtable Major Har- 
rison had arrived. Charles well knew how short a 
space divides the prison of a prince from his grave. 
He had often revolved in his mind "sad stories of the 
death of kings" — of Henry VI, of Edward II mur- 
dered at Berkeley, of Richard II at Pontefract, of his 



THE FINAL CRISIS 261 

grandmother at Fotheringay — and he thought that 
the presence of Harrison must mean that his own hour 
had now come for a hke mysterious doom. Harrison 
was no man for these midnight deeds, though he was 
fervid in his belief, and so he told the king, that justice 
was no respecter of persons, and great and small alike 
must be submitted to the law. Charles was relieved 
to find that he was only going "to exchange the worst 
of his castles for the best," and after a ride of four 
days (December 19-23) through the New Forest, Win- 
chester, Farnham, Bagshot, he found himself once 
more at the noblest of the palaces of the English sov- 
ereigns. Here for some three weeks he passed infatu- 
ated hours in the cheerful confidence that the dead-lock 
was as immovable as ever, that his enemies would find 
the knot inextricable, that he was still their master, 
and that the blessed day would soon arrive when he 
should fit round their necks the avenging halter. 



CHAPTER VII 



THE DEATH OF THE KING 



THE Commons meanwhile, duly purged or packed, 
had named a committee to consider the means of 
bringing the king to justice, and they passed an ordi- 
nance (January i, 1649) for setting up, to try him, a 
high court of justice composed of one hundred and fifty 
commissioners and three judges. After going through 
its three readings, and backed by a resolution that by 
the fundamental laws of the kingdom it is treason in 
the king to levy war against the Parliament and king- 
dom of England, the ordinance was sent up to the 
Lords. The Lords, only numbering twelve on this 
strange occasion, promptly, passionately, and unani- 
mously rejected it. The fifty or sixty members who 
were now the acting House of Commons, retorted with 
revolutionary energy, i They instantly passed a resolu- 
tion (January 4) affirming three momentous propo- 
sitions: that the people are the original of power; that 
the Commons in Parliament assembled have the su- 
preme power; and that what they enact has the force 
of law, even without the consent of eitlier, king or 
Lords, omitting^tlie judges and reducing the commis- 
sioners to one hundred and thirty-five. Then they 
passed their ordinance over again (January 6). Two 
days later the famous High Court of Justice met 

262 



THE DEATH OF THE KING 263 

for the first time in the Painted Chamber, but out of 
one hundred and thirty-five persons named in the act, 
no more than fifty-two appeared, Fairfax, Cromwell, 
and Ireton being among them. 

We must pause to consider what was the part that 
Cromwell played in this tragical unraveling of the plot. 
For long it can hardly have been the guiding part. 
He was not present when the officers decided to order 
the king to be brought from Hurst Castle to Windsor 
(December 15). He is known, during the week fol- 
lowing that event, to have been engaged in grave 
counsel with Speaker Lenthall and two other eminent 
men of the same legal and cautious temper, as though 
he were still painfully looking for some lawful door of 
escape from an impassable dilemma. Then he made a 
strong attempt to defer the king's trial until after they 
had tried other important delinquents in the second 
war. Finally there is a shadowy story of new over- 
tures to the king made with Cromwell's connivance on 
the very eve of the day of fate. On close handling the 
tale crumbles into guesswork; for the difference be- 
tween a safe and an unsafe guess is not enough to 
transform a possible into an actual event; and a hunt 
for conjectural motives for conjectural occurrences is 
waste of time. The curious delay in his return to 
London and the center of action is not without sig- 
nificance. He reaches Carlyle on October 14th, he 
does not summon Pontefract until November 9th, and 
he remains before it until the opening of December. 
It is hard to understand why he should not have left 
Lambert, a most excellent soldier, in charge of oper- 
ations at an earlier date, unless he had been wishful to 
let the manoeuvers in Parliament and camp take what 
course they might. He had no stronger feeling in emer- 
gency than a dread of forestalling the Lord's leadings. 



264 OLIVER CROMWELL 

The cloud that wraps Cromwell about during the ter- 
rible month between his return from Yorkshire and the 
erection of the High Court, is impenetrable; and we 
have no better guide than our general knowledge of his 
politic understanding, his caution, his persistence, his 
freedom from revengeful temper, his habitual slowness 
in making decisive moves. 

We may be sure that all through the month, as "he 
lay in one of the king's rich beds at Whitehall," where 
Fairfax and he had taken up their quarters, Cromwell 
revolved all the perils and sounded all the depths of 
the abyss to which necessity was hurrying him and the 
cause. What courses were open? They might by 
ordinance depose the king, and then either banish him 
from the realm, or hold him for the rest of his days in 
the Tower. Or could they try and condemn him, and 
then trust to the dark shadow of the axe upon his 
prison wall to frighten him at last into full surrender? 
Even if this design prevailed, what sanctity could the 
king or his successors be expected to attach to consti- 
tutional concessions granted under duress so dire? 
Again, was monarchy the indispensable key-stone, to 
lock all the parts of national government into their 
places? If so, then the king removed by deposition 

EXPLANATION OF THE LETTERS ON THE PRINT SHOWING THE TRIAL 
OF CHARLES I. (SEE NEXT PAGE.) 

A, the king ; B, the lord president, Bradshav/; C, John Lisle, D, W. Say, 
assistants to Bradshaw ; E, A. Broughton, F, John Phelps, clerks ; G, table 
with mace and sword; H, benches for the Commoners; I, arms of the 
Commonwealth, which the usurpers have caused there to be affixed ; K, 
Oliver Cromwell, L, Harry Martin, supporters of the Commonwealth ; M, 
spectators ; N, floor of the court, W, O, X, passage from the court ; P, Q, 
guard ; R, passage leading to the king's apartment ; S, council for the 
Commonwealth ; T, stairs from the body of the hall to the court ; V, pas- 
sage from Sir Robert Cotton's house, where the king was confined, to the 
hall; Y, spectators; Z, officers of the court. 




From Clarendon's "History of the Civil War," in the British Museum. 
THE TRIM, OF CHARLES I. 



fl 



THE DEATH OF THE KING 265 

or by abdication, perhaps one of his younger sons 
might be set up in his stead, with the army behind him. 
Was any course of this temporising kind practicable, 
even in the very first step of it, apart from later con- 
sequences ? Or was the temper of the army too fierce, 
the dream of the republican too vivid, the furnace of 
faction too hot? For we have to recollect that noth- 
ing in all the known world of politics is so intractable 
as a band of zealots conscious that they are a minor- 
ity, yet armed by accident with the powers of a major- 
ity. Party considerations were not likely to be 
omitted; and to destroy the king was undoubtedly 
to strike a potent instrument out of the hands of the 
Presbyterians. Whatever reaction might follow in 
the public mind would be to the advantage of Royal- 
ism, not of Presbyterianism, and so indeed it ultimately 
proved. Yet to bring the king to trial and to cut off 
his head — is it possible to suppose that Cromwell was 
blind to the endless array of new difficulties that would 
instantly spring up from that inexpiable act? Here 
was the fatal mischief. No other way may have been 
conceivable out of the black flood of difficulties in 
which the ship and its fiery crew were tossing, and 
Cromwell with his firm gaze had at last persuaded him- 
self that this way must be tried. What is certain is 
that he cannot have forgotten to count the cost, and 
he must have known what a wall he was raising against 
that settlement of the peace of the nation which he so 
devoutly hoped for. 

After all, violence, though in itself always an evil 
and always the root of evil, is not the worst of evils, 
so long as it does not mean the obliteration of the sense 
of righteousness and of duty. And, however we may 
judge the balance of policy to have inclined,' men like 
Cromwell felt to the depths of their hearts that in put- 



266 OLIVER CROMWELL 

ting to death the man whose shifty and senseless coun- 
sels had plunged the land in bloodshed and confusion, 
they were performing an awful act of sovereign justice 
and executing the decree of the supreme. Men like 
Ludlow might feed and fortify themselves on misin- 
terpretations of sanguinary texts from the Old Testa- 
ment. "I was convinced." says that hard-tempered 
man, "that an accommodation with the king was un- 
just and wicked in the nature of it by the express 
words of God's law ; that blood defileth the land, and 
the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed 
therein, but by the blood of him that shed it^ Crom- 
well was as much addicted to an apt text as anybody, 
but the stern crisis of' his life was not to be settled by 
a single verse of the Bible. Only one utterance of his 
at this grave moment survives, and though in the high- 
est degree remarkable, it is opaque rather than trans- 
parent. When the ordinance creating the High Court 
was before the House of Commons, he said this : — "If 
any man whatsoever hath carried on the design of de- 
posing the king, and disinheriting his posterity; or, if 
any man had yet such a design, he should be the great- 
est rebel and traitor in the world; but since the provi- 
dence of God and Necessity hath cast this upon us, I 
shall pray God to bless our counsels, though I be not 
provided on the sudden to give you counsel." Provi- 
dence and Necessity — that is to say, the purpose of 
heaven disclosed in the shape of an invincible problem, 
to which there was only one solution, and that a solu- 
tion imposed by force of circumstance and not to be 
defended by mere secular reasoning. 

However slow and painful the steps, a decision once 
taken was to Cromwell irrevocable. No man was ever 
more free from the vice of looking back, and he now 
threw himself into the king's trial at its final stages with 



THE DEATH OF THE KING 267 

the same ruthless energy with which he had ridden down 
the king's men at Marston or Naseby. Men of virtue, 
courage, and pubhc spirit as eminent as his own, stood 
resohitely aside, and would not join him. Algernon 
Sidney, whose name had been put in among the judges, 
went into the Painted Chamber with the others, and 
after listening to the debate, withstood Cromwell, 
Bradshaw, and the others to the face, on the double 
ground that the king could be tried by no court, and 
that by such a court as that was, no man at all could 
be tried. Cromwell broke in upon him in hoarse 
anger, 'T tell you, we will cut off his head with the 
crown upon it." 'T cannot stop you," Sidney replied, 
"but I will keep myself clean from having any hand in 
this business." Vane had been startled even by Pride's 
Purge, and though he and Oliver were as brothers to 
one another, he refused either now to take any part in 
the trial, or ever to approve the execution afterward. 
Stories are told indicative of Cromwell's rough excite- 
ment and misplaced buffooneries, but they are probably 
mythic. It is perhaps true that on the first day of the 
trial, looking forth from the Painted Chamber, he saw 
the king step from his barge on his way to Westmin- 
ster Hall, and "with a face as white as the wall," called 
out to the others that the king was coming, and that 
they must be ready to answer what was sure to be the 
king's first question, namely, by what authority they 
called him before them. 

This was indeed the question that the king put. and 
would never let drop. It had been Sidney's question, 
and so far as law and constitution went, there was no 
good answer to it. The authority of the tribunal was 
founded upon nothing more valid than a mere reso- 
lution, called an ordinance, of some fifty members — 
what was in truth little more than a bare quorum — of 



268 OLIVER CROMWELL 

a single branch of Parliament, originally composed of 
nearly ten times as many, and deliberately reduced for 
the express purpose of such a resolution by the violent 
exclusion a month before of one hundred and forty- 
three of its members. If the legal authority was null, 
the moral authority for the act creating the High 
Court was no stronger. It might be well enough to 
say that the people are the origin of power, but as a 
matter of fact the handful who erected the High Court 
of Justice notoriously did not represent the people in 
any sense of that conjurer's word. They were never 
chosen by the people to make laws apart from king and 
lords ; and they were now picked out by the soldiers to 
do the behest of soldiers. 

In short, the High Court of Justice was hardly better 
or worse than a drumhead court-martial, and had just 
as much or just as little legal authority to try King 
Charles, as a board of officers would have had to try 
him under the orders of Fairfax or Oliver if they had 
taken him prisoner on the field of Naseby. Bishop 
Butler, in his famous sermon in 1741 on the anni- 
versary of the martyrdom of King Charles, takes 
hypocrisy for his subject, and declares that no age can 
show an example of hypocrisy parallel to such a pro- 
faning of the forms of justice as the arraignment of 
the king. And it is here that Butler lets fall the som- 
ber reflection, so poignant to all who vainly expect too 
much from the hearts and understanding of mankind, 
that "the history of all ages and all countries will show 
what has been really going forward over the face of 
the earth, to be very different from what has been 
always pretended ; and that virtue has been everywhere 
professed much more than it has been anywhere prac- 
tised." We may, if we be so minded, accept Butler's 
general reflection, and assuredly it cannot lightly be 




Clft): ^tu^'^M^. ^^^ 




J ^<^ 



-iLcX- 



JL^^ 



^tUofra/>li fiom an Onpina/ in tJ>r HftijTnon if 
John Than'-. 



i 



From Clarendon's " History of the Civil War," in the Hope Collection, 
Bodleian Library, by permission of the University of Oxford. 



THE DEATH OF THE KING 269 

dismissed ; but it is hardly the best explanation of this 
particular instance. Self-deception is a truer as well 
as a kinder word than hypocrisy, and here in one sense 
the institution of something with the aspect of a court 
was an act of homage to conscience and to habit of law. 
Many must have remembered the clause in the Petition 
of Right, not yet twenty years old, forbidding martial 
law. Yet martial law this was and nothing else, if 
that be the name for uncontrolled arbitrament of the 
man with the sword. 

In outer form as in interior fact, the trial of the king 
had much of the rudeness of the camp, little of the 
solemnity of a judicial tribunal. The pathetic element 
so strong in human nature, save when rough action 
summons ; that imaginative sensibility, which is the 
fountain of pity when there is time for tears, and lei- 
sure to listen to the heart ; these counted for nothing in 
that fierce and peremptory hour. Such moods are for 
history or for onlookers in stern scenes, not for the 
actors. Charles and Cromwell had both of them long 
stood too close to death in many grisly shapes, had 
seen too many slaughtered men, to shrink from an en- 
counter without quarter. Westminster Hall was full 
of soldiery, and resounded with their hoarse shouts 
for justice and execution. The king with his hat upon 
his head eyed the judges with unaffected scorn, and 
with unmeaning iteration urged his point, that they 
were no court and that he was there by no law. Brad- 
shaw, the president, retorted with high-handed warn- 
ings to his captive that contumacy would be of no 
avail. Cromwell was present at every sitting with 
one doubtful exception. For three days the alterca- 
tion went on, as fruitless as it was painful, for the 
court intended that the king should die. He was in- 
credulous to the last. On the fourth and fifth days 



270 OLIVER CROMWELL 

(January 24-25) the court sat in private in the Painted 
Chamber, and listened to depositions that could prove 
nothing not already fully known. The object was less 
to satisfy the conscience of the court, than to make 
time for pressure on its more backward members. 
There is some evidence that Cromwell was among the 
most fervid in enforcing the point that they could not 
come to a settlement of the true religion until the king, 
the arch obstructor, was put out of the way. On the 
next day (January 26) the court, numbering sixty-two 
members, adopted the verdict and sentence that Charles 
was a tyrant, traitor, murderer, and public enemy to 
the good people of this nation, and that he should be 
put to death by the severing of his head from his body. 
On the 27th an end came to the proceedings. Charles 
was for the fourth time brought into the hall, and amid 
much noise and disorder he attempted to speak. He 
sought an interview with the Lords and Commons in 
the Painted Chamber, but this after deliberation was 
refused. The altercations between the king and Brad- 
shaw were renewed, and after a long harangue from 
Bradshaw sentence was pronounced. The king, still 
endeavoring in broken sentences to make himself heard, 
was hustled away from the hall by his guards. The 
composure, piety, seclusion, and silence in which he 
passed the three days of life that were left, made a deep 
impression on the time, and have moved men's com- 
mon human-heartedness ever since. In Charles him- 
self, whether for foe or friend, an Eliot or a Strafford, 
pity was a grace unknown. 

On the fatal day (January 30) he was taken to 
Whitehall, now more like a barrack than a palace. 
Fairfax, Cromwell, Ireton, and Harrison were prob- 
ably all in the building when he arrived, though the 
first of them had held stiffly aloof from all the pro- 



THE DEATH OF THE KING 271 

ceedings of the previous ten days. A story was told 
afterward that just before the execution, Cromwell, 
seated in Ireton's room, when asked for a warrant ad- 
dressed to the executioner (who seems to have been 
Brandon, the common hangman), wrote out the order 
with his own hand for signature by one of the three offi- 
cers to whom the High Court had addressed the actual 
death-warrant. Charles bore himself with unshaken 
dignity and fortitude to the end. At a single stroke 
the masked headman did his work. Ten days later the 
corpse was conveyed by a little band of devoted friends 
to Windsor, where amid falling flakes of snow they 
took it into Saint George's Chapel. Clarendon stamps 
upon our memories the mournful coldness, the squalor, 
and the desolation like a scene from some grey under- 
world : — "Then they went into the church to make 
choice of a place for burial. But when they entered 
into it, which they had been so well acquainted with, 
they found it so altered and transformed, all tombs, 
inscriptions, and those landmarks pulled down by 
which all men knew every particular place in that 
church, and such a dismal mutilation over the whole 
that they knew not where they were ; nor was there one 
old officer that had belonged to it, or knew where our 
princes had used to be interred. At last there was a 
fellow of the town who undertook to tell them the 
place, where, he said, 'there was a vault in which King 
Harry the Eighth and Queen Jane Seymour were in- 
terred.' As near that place as could conveniently be, 
they caused the grave to be made. There the king's 
body was laid without any words, or other ceremonies 
than the tears and sighs of the few beholders. Upon 
the coffin was a plate of silver fixed with these words 
only — King Charles, 1648. When the coffin was put 
in, the black velvet pall that had covered it was thrown 



272 OLIVER CROMWELL 

over it, and then the earth thrown in, which the gover- 
nor stayed to see perfectly done, and then took the keys 
of the church, which was seldom put to any use." 

Cromwell's own view of this momentous transaction 
was constant. A year later he speaks to the officers 
of "the great fruit of the war, to wit, the execution of 
exemplary justice upon the prime leader of all this 
quarrel." Many months after this, he talks of the 
turning-out of the tyrant in a way which the Chris- 
tians in after times will mention with honor, and all 
tyrants in the world look at with fear ; many thousands 
of saints in England rejoice to think of it ; they that 
have acted in this great business have given a reason of 
their faith in the action, and are ready further to do it 
against all gainsayers. The execution was an eminent 
witness of the Lord for blood-guiltiness. In a con- 
versation again, one evening, at Edinburgh, he is said 
to have succeeded in converting some hostile Presby- 
terians to the view that the taking away of the king's 
life was inevitable. There is a story that while the 
corpse of the king still lay in the gallery at Whitehall, 
Cromwell was observed by unseen watchers to come 
muffled in his cloak to the coffin, and raising the lid, 
and gazing on the face of the king, was heard to mur- 
mur several times, "Cruel tieccssify.'' The incident is 
pretty certainly apocryphal, for this was not the dialect 
of Oliver's philosophy. 

Extravagant things have been said about the exe- 
cution of the king by illustrious men from Charles Fox 
to Carlyle. "We may doubt," says Fox, "whether any 
other circumstance has served so much to raise the 
character of the English nation in the opinion of 
Europe." "This action of the English regicides," says 
Carlyle, "did in effect strike a damp-like death through 
the heart of Flunkyism universally in this world. 




From the original portrait by Van Dyck in the Louvre (detail). 
CHARLES L 



I 



THE DEATH OF THE KING 273 

Whereof Flunkyism, Cant, Cloth-worship, or what- \ 
ever ugly name it have, has gone about miserably sick 
ever since, and is now in these generations very rapidly 
dying." Cant, alas, is not slain on any such easy 
terms by a single stroke of the republican headsman's 
axe. As if for that matter force, violence, sword, and 
axe, never conceal a cant and an unveracity of their 
own, viler and crueller than any other. In fact, the 
very contrary of Carlyle's proposition as to death and 
damp might more fairly be upheld. For this at least 
is certain, that the execution of Charles I kindled and 
nursed for many generations a lasting flame of cant, 
flunkyism, or whatever else be the right name of 
spurious and unmanly sentimentalism, more lively 
than is associated with any other business in our whole 
national history. 

The two most sensible things to be said about the 
trial and execution of Charles I have often been said 
before. One is that the proceeding was an act of war. 
and was just as defensible or just as assailable, and on 
the same grounds, as the war itself. The other re- 
mark, though tolerably conclusive alike by Milton and by 
Voltaire, is that the regicides treated Charles precisely 
as Charles, if he had won the game, undoubtedly prom- 
ised himself with law or without law that he would 
treat them. The author of the attempt upon the Five 
Members in 1642 was not entitled to plead punctilious 
demurrers to the revolutionary jurisdiction. From the 
first it had been My head or thy head, and Charles had 
lost. 



18 



BOOK FOUR 



i 



Boo!^ jfour 



CHAPTER I 



THE COMMONWEALTH 



THE death of the king made nothing easier, and 
changed nothing for the better ; it removed no old 
difficulties, and it added new. Cromwell and his allies 
must have expected as much, and they confronted the 
task with all the vigilance and energy of men unalter- 
ably convinced of the goodness of their cause, confi- 
dently following the pillar of cloud by day, the pillar 
of fire by night. Their goal was the establishment of 
a central authority; the unification of the kingdoms; 
the substitution of a nation for a dynasty as the main- 
spring of power and the standard of public aims ; a set- 
tlement of religion, the assertion of maritime strength ; 
the protectional expansion of national commerce. 
Long, tortuous, and rough must be the road. A small 
knot of less than a hundred and fifty commoners repre- 
sented all that was left of Parliament, and we have a 
test of the condition to which it was reduced in the 
fact that during the three months after Pride's Purge, 
the thirteen divisions that took place represented an 
average attendance of less than sixty. They resolved 
that the House of Peers was useless and dangerous and 
ought to be abolished. They resolved a couple of days 
later that experience had shown the office of a king, 
and to have the power of the office in any single per- 
son to be unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous, 

277 



2/8 OLIVER CROMWELL 

and therefore that this also ought to be aboHshed. In 
March these resolutions were turned into what were 
called acts of Parliament. A Council of State was 
created to which the executive power was entrusted. 
It consisted of forty persons and was to last a year, 
three fourths of its members being at the same time 
members of Parliament. Provision was made for the 
administration of justice as far as possible by the ex- 
isting judges, and without change in legal principles 
or judicial procedure. On May 19th a final act was 
passed proclaiming England to be a free common- 
wealth, to be governed by the representatives of the 
people in Parliament without king or House of Lords. 
Writs were to run in the name of the Keepers of the 
Liberties of England. The date was marked as the 
First Year of Freedom by God's blessing restored. 

We can hardly suppose that Cromwell was under 
any illusion that constitutional resolutions on paper 
could transmute a revolutionary group, installed by 
military force and by that force subsisting, into a 
chosen body of representatives of the people adminis- 
tering a free commonwealth. He had striven to come 
to terms with the king in 1647, ^^^^ had been reluc- 
tantly forced into giving him up in 1648. He was 
now accepting a form of government resting upon the 
same theoretical propositions that he had stoutly com- 
bated in the camp debates two years before, and subject 
to the same ascendancy of the soldier of which he had 
then so clearly seen all the fatal mischief. But Crom- 
well was of the active, not the reflective temper. 
What he saw was that the new government had from 
the first to fight for its life. All the old elements of 
antagonism remained. The Royalists, outraged in 
their deepest feelings by the death of their lawful king, 
had instantly transferred their allegiance with height- 
ened fervor to his lawful successor. The Presbyte- 



THE COMMONWEALTH 279 

rians who were also Royalist were exasperated both by 
the failure of their religious schemes, and by the sting 
of political and party defeat. The peers, though only 
a few score in number, yet powerful by territorial in- 
fluence, were cut to the cjuick by the suppression of 
their legislative place. The Episcopal clergy, from the 
highest ranks in the hierarchy to the lowest, suffered 
with natural resentment the deprivation of their spirit- 
ual authority and their temporal revenues. It was 
calculated that the friends of the policy of intolerance 
were no less than five sevenths of the people of the 
country. Yet the Independents, though so inferior 
in numbers, were more important than either Presby- 
terians or Episcopalians, for the reason that their power 
was concentrated in an omnipotent army. The move- 
ment named generically after them, comprised a hun- 
dred heterogeneous shades, from the grand humanism 
of Milton down to the fancies of whimsical mystics 
who held that it was sin to wear garments, and believed 
that heaven is only six miles off. The old quarrel 
about church polity w^as almost overwhelmed by tur- 
bid tides of theological enthusiasm. This enthusiasm 
developed strange theocracies, nihilisms, anarchies, 
and it soon became one of the most pressing tasks of 
the new republic, as afterward of Cromwell himself, 
to grapple with the political danger that overflowed 
from the heavings of spiritual confusion. A Royalist 
of the time thus describes the position : — "The Inde- 
pendents possessed all the forts, towns, navy and trea- 
sure ; the Presbyterians yet hold a silent power by 
means of the divines, and the interest of some nobility 
and gentry, especially in London and the great towns. 
His Majesty's party in England is so poor, so dis- 
jointed, so severely watched by both factions, that it is 
impossible for them to do anything on their own score." 
The other two ancient kingdoms that were joined to 



28o OLIVER CROMWELL 

the new-born State of England, were each of them 
centers of hostihty and peril to the common fabric. 
On the continent of Europe, the new rulers of Eng- 
land had not a friend ; even the Dutch were drawn 
away from them by a powerful Orange party that was 
naturally a Stuart party. It seemed as if an accident 
might make a hostile foreign combination possible, 
and almost as if only a miracle could prevent it. 
Rupert had possessed himself of a small fleet, the Roy- 
alists were masters of the Isle of Man, of Jersey and 
the Scilly Isles, and English trade was the prey of 
their piratical enterprise. The Commonwealth had 
hardly counted its existence by weeks, before it was 
menaced by deadly danger in its very foundations, 
by signs of an outbreak in the armed host, now 
grown to over forty thousand men that had destroyed 
the king, mutilated the Parliament, and fastened 
its yoke alike upon the Parliamentary remnant, the 
Council of State, and the majority of the inhabitants 
of the realm. Natural right, law of nature, one He 
as good as another He, the reign of Christ and his 
saints in a fifth and final monarchy, all the rest of the 
theocratic and leveling theories that had startled Crom- 
well in 1647, were found to be just as applicable 
against a military commonwealth as against a king by 
divine right. The cry of the political leveler was led 
by Lilburne, one of the men whom all revolutions are 
apt to engender — intractable, narrow, dogmatic, prag- 
matic, clever hands at syllogisms, liberal in uncharitable 
imputation and malicious construction, honest in their 
rather questionable way, animated by a pharisaic love 
of self-applause which is in truth not any more meri- 
torious nor any less unsafe than vain love of the 
world's applause ; in a word, not without sharp in- 
sight into theoretic principle, and thinking quite as 



THE COMMONWEALTH 281 

little of their own ease as the ease of others, but with- 
out a trace of the instinct for government or a grain of 
practical common sense. Such was Lilburne the head- 
strong, and such the temper in thousands of others 
with whom Cromwell had painfully to wrestle for all 
the remainder of his life. The religious enthusiasts, 
who formed the second great division of the impracti- 
cable, were more attractive than the scribblers of ab- 
stract politics, but they were just as troublesome. A 
reflective Royalist or Presbyterian might well be 
excused for asking himself whether a party, with men 
of this stamp for its mainspring, could ever be made 
fit for the great art of working institutions, and con- 
trolling the forces of a mighty state. Lilburne's popu- 
larity, which was immense, signified not so much any 
general sympathy with its first principles or his rest- 
less politics, as aversion to military rule or perhaps 
indeed to any rule. If the mutiny spread, and the 
army broke away, the men at the head of the govern- 
ment knew that all was gone. They acted with celer- 
ity and decision. Fairfax and Cromwell handled the 
mutineers with firmness tempered by clemency, with- 
out either vindictiveness or panic. Of the very few 
who suffered military execution, some were made pop- 
ular martyrs — and this was an indication the more 
how narrow was the base on which the Commonwealth 
had been reared. Other dangers came dimly into 
view. For a moment it seemed as if political revolu- 
tion was to contain the seeds of social revolution ; 
Levelers were followed by Diggers. War had wasted 
the country and impoverished the people, and one day 
(April, 1650) a small company of poor men were 
found digging up the ground on St. George's Hill in 
Surrey, sowing it with carrots and beans, and announc- 
ing that they meant to do away with all enclosures. 



282 OLIVER CROMWELL 

It was the reproduction in the seventeenth century of 
the story of Robert Kett of Norfolk in the sixteenth. 
The eternal sorrows of the toiler led him to dream, as 
in the daw^n of the Reformation peasants had dreamed, 
that the Bible sentences had for them, too, some sig- 
nificance. "At this very day," wrote Winstanley. a 
neglected figure of those times, "poor people are forced 
to work for twopence a day, and corn is dear. And 
the tithing priest stops their mouth, and tells them that 
"inward satisfaction of mind" was meant by the decla- 
ration : The poor shall inherit the earth. I tell you the 
Scripture is to be really and materially fulfilled. You 
jeer at the name Leveler. I tell you Jesus Christ is 
the head Leveler." {Gooch, p. 220.) Fairfax and 
the council wisely made little of the affair, and people 
awoke to the hard truth that to turn a monarchy into 
a free commonwealth is not enough to turn the purga- 
tory of our social life into a paradise. Meanwhile the 
minority possessed of power resorted to the ordinary 
devices of unpopular rule. They levied immense fines 
upon the property of delinquents, sometimes confiscat- 
ing as much as half the value. A rigorous censorship 
of the press was established. The most diligent care 
was enjoined upon the local authorities to prevent trou- 
blesome public meetings. The pulpits were w-atched, 
that nothing should be said in prejudice of the peace 
and honor of the government. The old law of treason 
was stiffened, but so long as trial by jury was left, the 
hardening of the statute was of little use. The High 
Court of Justice was therefore set up to deal with 
offenders for wdiom no law was strong enough. 

The worst difficulties of the government, however, 
lay beyond the reach of mere rigor of police at home. 
Both in Ireland and Scotland the regicide common- 
wealth found foes. All the three kingdoms were in 



THE COMMONWEALTH 283 

a blaze. The prey of insurrection in Ireland had lent 
fuel to rebellion in England, and the flames of rebellion 
in England might lla^'e been put out, but for the neces- 
sities of revolt in Scotland. The statesmen of the 
Commonwealth misunderstood the malady in Ireland, 
and they failed to found a stable system in Britain ; but 
they grasped with amazing vigor and force the prob- 
lem of dealing with the three kingdoms as a whole. 
This strenuous comprehension marked them out as 
men of originality, insight, and power. Charles II 
was in different fashions instantly proclaimed king in 
both countries, and the only question was from which 
of the two outlying kingdoms would the new king 
wage war against the rulers who had slain his father, 
and usurped the powers that were by law and right his 
own. Ireland had gone through strange vicissitudes 
during the years of the civil struggle in England. It 
has been said that no human intellect could make a 
clear story of the years of triple and fourfold distraction 
in Ireland from the rebellion of 1641 down to the death 
of Charles I. Happily it is not necessary for us to 
attempt the task. Three remarkable figures stand out 
conspicuously in the chaotic scene. Ormonde repre- 
sented in varied forms the English interest, one of the 
most admirably steadfast, patient, clear-sighted and 
honorable names in the list of British statesmen. 
Owen Roe O'Neill, a good soldier, a man of valor and 
character, was the patriotic champion of Catholic Ire- 
land. Rinuccini, the Pope's nuncio, — an able and am- 
bitious man, ultramontane, caring very little for either 
Irish landlords or Irish Nationalists, caring not at all 
for heretical Royalists, but devoted to the interests of 
his church all over the world, — was in his heart bent 
upon erecting a papal Ireland under the protection of 
some foreign Catholic sovereign. 



284 OLIVER CROMWELL 

All these types, though with obvious differences on 
the surface, may easily be traced in Irish affairs down 
to our own century. The nearest approach to an 
organ of Government was the supreme council of the 
confederate Catholics at Kilkenny, in which the sub- 
stantial interest was that of the Catholic English of 
the Pale. Between them and the nuncio little love 
was lost, for Ireland has never been ultramontane. 
A few days before the death of the king (January, 
1649) Ormonde made what promised to be a prudent 
peace with the Catholics at Kilkenny, by which the 
confederate Irish were reconciled to the crown, on the 
basis of complete toleration for their religion and free- 
dom for their Parliament. It was a great and lasting 
misfortune that Puritan bigotry prevented Oliver from 
pursuing the same policy on behalf of the common- 
wealth as Ormonde pursued on behalf of the king. 
The confederate Catholics, long at bitter feud with the 
ultramontane nuncio, bade him intermeddle no more 
with the affairs of that kingdom; and a month after 
the peace Rinuccini departed. 

It was clear that even such small hold as the Parlia- 
ment still retained upon Ireland was in instant peril. 
The old dread of an Irish army being landed upon the 
western shores of England in the Royalist interest, 
possibly in more or less concert with invaders from 
Scotland, revived in full force. Cromwell's view of 
the situation was explained to the Council of State 
at Whitehall (March 23, 16^19). The question was 
whether he would undertake the Irish command. ''If 
we do not endeavor to make good our interest there," 
he said, after describing the singular combination that 
Ormonde was contriving against them, "we shall not 
only have our interests rooted out there, but they w411 
in a very short time be able to land forces in England. 




From a pastel portrait by Sir Peter Lely in the Irish National Portrait 
Gallery, by permission of the Director. 

JAMES BUTLER, TWELFTH EARL AND FIRST DUKE OF ORMONDE. 



I 



THE COMMONWEALTH 285 

I confess I had rather be overrun with a Cavaherish 
interest than a Scotch interest ; I had rather be overrun 
with a Scotch interest than an Irish interest ; and I 
think, of all, this is the most dangerous." Stating the 
same thing differently he argued that even Englishmen 
who were for a restoration upon terms, ought still to 
resist the forced imposition of a king upon them either 
by Ireland or by Scotland. In other words, the con- 
test between the crown and the Parliament had now 
developed into a contest, first for union among the 
three kingdoms, and next for the predominance of 
England v/ithin that union. Of such antique date are 
some modern cjuarrels. 



CHAPTER II 



CROMWELL IN IRELAND 



IT is not enough to describe one who has the work 
of a statesman to do as "a .veritable Heaven's mes- 
senger clad in thunder." We must still recognize that 
the reasoning faculty in man is good for something. 
'T could long for an Oliver without Rhetoric at all," 
Carlyle exclaims, "I could long for a Mahomet, whose 
persuasive eloquence with wild flashing heart and sim- 
itar, is : 'Wretched mortal, give up that ; or by the 
Eternal, thy maker and mine, I will kill thee ! Thou 
blasphemous, scandalous Misbirth of Nature, is not 
even that the kindest thing I can do for thee, if thou 
repent not and alter, in the name of Allah?' " Even 
such sonorous oracles as these do not altogether escape 
the guilt of Rhetoric. As if, after all, there might not 
be just as much of sham, phantasm, emptiness, and lies 
in Action as in Rhetoric. Archbishop Laud with his 
wild flashing simitar slicing off the ears of Prynne, 
Charles maliciously doing Eliot to death in the Tower, 
the familiars of the Holy Oflice, Spaniards exterminating 
hapless Indians, English Puritans slaying Irishwomen 
at Naseby, the monarchs of the Spanish peninsula 
driving populations of Jews and Moors wholesale and 
innocent to exile and despair — all these would deem 
themselves entitled to hail their hapless victims as blas- 
phemous Misbirths of Nature. What is the test? 

286 



CROMWELL IN IRELAND 287 

How can we judge? The Dithyrambic does not help 
lis. It is not a question between Action and Rhetoric, 
but the far profounder question aHke in word and in 
deed between just and unjust, rational and short- 
sighted, cruel and humane. 

The Parliament faced the Irish danger with char- 
acteristic energy, nor would Cromwell accept the com- 
mand without characteristic deliberation. "Whether 
I go or stay," he said, "is as God shall incline my 
heart." And he had no leading of this kind, until he 
had in a practical way made sure that his forces would 
have adequate provision, and a fair settlement of 
arrears. The departure of Julius Caesar for Gaul at a 
moment when Rome was in the throes of civil confu- 
sion, has sometimes been ascribed to a desire to make 
the west a drill-ground for his troops, in view of the 
military struggle that he foresaw approaching in Italy. 
Motives of a similar sort have been invented to explain 
Oliver's w^illingness to absent himself from Westmin- 
ster at critical hours. The explanation is probably as 
far-fetched in one case as in the other. The self-inter- 
est of the calculating statesman would hardly prompt 
a distant and dangerous military expedition, for Crom- 
well knew, as he had known when he started for Pres- 
ton in 1648, what active enemies he left behind him. 
some in the ranks of the army, others comprehending 
the whole of the Presbyterian party, and all embittered 
by the triumph of the military force to which instru- 
mentally they owed their very existence. The sim- 
plest explanation is in Oliver's case the best. A sol- 
dier's work was the next work to be done, and he might 
easily suppose that the God of Battles meant him to 
do it. Everybody else supposed the same. 

It was August (1649) before Cromwell embarked, 
and before sailing, "he did expound some places of 



288 OLIVER CROMWELL 

Scripture excellently well, and pertinent to the occa- 
sion." He arrived in Dublin as Lord Lieutenant and 
commander of the forces. After a short time, for the 
refreshment of his weather-beaten men, he advanced 
northward, some ten thousand strong, to Drogheda, 
and here his Irish career began with an incident of un- 
happy fame. Modern research adds little in the way 
either of correction or of amplification to Cromwell's 
own story. He arrived before Drogheda on September 
3d, the memorable date of three other decisive days in 
his history. A week later he summoned Ormond's 
garrison to surrender, and receiving no reply he opened 
fire, and breached the wall in two places. The next 
day, about five in the evening, he began the storm, and 
after a hot and stiff defense that twice beat back his 
veterans, on the third assault, with Oliver himself at 
the head of it, they entered the town and were masters 
of the Royalist entrenchments. Aston, the general in 
command, scoured up a steep mound, "a place very 
strong and of difficult access ; being exceedingly high, 
having a good graft, and strongly palisaded." He 
had some three hundred men with him, and to storm 
his position would have cost several hundreds of lives. 
A parley seems to have taken place, and Aston was per- 
suaded to disarm by a Cromwellian band who had pur- 
sued him up the steep. At this point Cromwell ordered 
that they should all be put to the sword. It was done. 
Then came another order. "Being in the heat of 
action, I forbade them to spare any that were in arms 
in the town; and I think that night they put to the 
sword about two thousand men; divers of the officers 
and soldiers being fled over the bridge into the other 
(the northern) part of the town." Eighty of them 
took refuge in the steeple of St. Peter's church; and 
others in the towers at two of the gates. "Whereon I 



CROMWELL IN IRELAND 289 

ordered the church steeple to be fired, when, one of 
them was heard to say, 'God damn me, God confound 
me; I burn, I burn.' " Of the eighty wretches in the 
steeple, fifty were slain and thirty perished in the 
flames. Cromwell notes with particular satisfaction 
what took place at St. Peter's church. "It is remark- 
able," he says, "that these people had grown so inso- 
lent that the last Lord's Day, before the storm, the 
Protestants were thrust out of the great church called 
St. Peter's, and they had public Mass there; and in this 
very place, near one thousand of them were put to the 
sword, fleeing thither for safety." Of those in one of 
the towers, when they submitted, "their officers were 
knocked on the head, and every tentli man of the sol- 
diers killed, and the rest shipped for the Barbadoes. 
The soldiers in the other tower were all spared as to 
their lives only, and shipped likewise for the Barba- 
does." Even when time might have been expected 
to slake the sanguinary frenzy, officers in hiding were 
sought out and killed in cold blood. "All the friars," 
says Cromwell, "were knocked on the head promiscu- 
ously but two. The enemy were about three thou- 
sand strong in the town. I believe we put to the sword 
the whole number of the defendants. I do not think 
thirty of the whole number escaped with their Hves." 
These three thousand were killed, with a loss of only 
sixty-four to those who killed them. 

Such is the unvarnished tale of the Drogheda mas- 
sacre. Its perpetrator himself felt at the first moment 
when "the heat of action" had passed, that it needed 
justification. "Such actions," he says, "cannot but 
work remorse and regret," unless there be satisfactory 
grounds for them, and the grounds that he alleges are 
two. One is revenge, and the other is policy. "I am 
persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God 
19 



290 OLIVER CROMWELL 

upon those barbarous wretches, who have imbrued 
their hands in so much innocent blood ; and that it will 
tend to prevent the effusion of blood in the future." 
And then comes a theory of the divine tactics in these 
operations, which must be counted one of the most 
wonderful of all the recorded utterances of Puritan the- 
ology. "And now give me leave to say how it comes to 
pass that this work is wrought. It was set upon some 
of our hearts, that a great thing should be done, not by 
power or might, but by the spirit of God. And is it 
not so, clearly ? That which caused your men to storm 
so courageously, it was the spirit of God, who gave 
your men courage and took it away again ; and gave the 
enemy courage, and took it away again ; and gave your 
men courage again, and therewith this happy success. 
And therefore it is good that God alone have all the 
glory." 

That Cromwell's ruthless severity may have been 
justified by the strict letter of the military law of the 
time, is just possible. It may be true, as is contended, 
that this slaughter was no worse than some of the 
worst acts of those commanders in the Thirty Years' 
War, whose names have ever since stood out in crim- 
son letters on the page of European history as bywords 
of cruelty and savagery. That, after all, is but dubi- 
ous extenuation. Though he may have had a technical 
right to give no cjuarter where a storm had followed 
the refusal to surrender, in England this right was 
only used by him once in the whole course of the war, 
and in his own defense of the massacre it was not upon 
military right that he chose to stand. The language 
used by Ludlow about it shows that even in the opinion 
of that time what was done needed explanation. "The 
slaughter was continued all day and the next," he says, 
"which extraordinary severity, I presume, was used to 



CROMWELL IN IRELAND 291 

discourage others from making opposition." This, as we 
have seen, was one of the two explanations given by 
OHver himself. The general question, how far in such 
a case the end warrants the means, is a question of 
military and Christian ethics which it is not for us to 
discuss here, but we may remind the reader that not a 
few of the most barbarous enormities in human annals 
have been excused on the same ground, that in the long 
run the gibbet, stake, torch, sword, and bullet are the 
truest mercy, sometimes to men's lives here, sometimes 
to their souls hereafter. No less equivocal was Crom- 
well's second plea. The massacre, he says, was a 
righteous vengeance upon the wretches who had im- 
brued their hands in so much innocent blood in Ulster 
eight years before. Yet he must have known that of 
the three thousand men who were butchered at Drog- 
heda, of the friars who were knocked on the head pro- 
miscuously, and of the officers who were killed in cold 
blood, not a single victim was likely to have had part 
or lot in the Ulster atrocities of 1641. More than one 
contemporary authority (including Ludlow and Clar- 
endon) says the garrison was mostly English, and 
undoubtedly a contingent was English and Protestant. 
The better opinion on the whole now seems to be that 
most of the slain men were Irish and Catholic, but thafe 
they came from Kilkenny and other parts of the coun- 
try far outside of Ulster, and so were "in the highest 
degree unlikely to have had any hand in the Ulster 
massacre" of 1641. 

Again that the butchery of Drogheda did actually 
prevent in any marked degree further effusion of 
blood is not clear. Cromwell remained in Ireland 
nine months longer, and the war was not extinguished 
for two years after his departure. The nine months of 
his sojourn in the country were a time of unrelaxing 



292 OLIVER CROMWELL 

effort on one side, and obstinate resistance on the other. 
From Drogheda he marched south to Wexford. The 
garrison made a good stand for several days, but at last 
were compelled to parley. A traitor during the parley 
yielded up the castle, and the Irish on the walls with- 
drew into the town. "Which our men perceiving, ran 
violently upon the town with their ladder and stormed 
it. And when they were come into the market-place, 
the enemy making a stiff resistance, our forces broke 
them ; and then put all to the sword that came in their 
way. I believe in all there was lost of the enemy not 
many less than two thousand, and I believe not twenty 
of ours from first to last of the siege." The town was 
sacked, and priests and friars were again knocked on 
the head, some of them in a Protestant chapel which 
they had been audacious enough to turn into a Mass- 
house. For all this Cromwell was not directly respon- 
sible as he had been at Drogheda. "Indeed it hath, 
not without cause, been set upon our hearts, that we,' 
intending better to this place than so great a ruin, hop- 
ing the town might be of more use to you and your 
army, yet God would not have it so ; but by an unex- 
pected providence in his righteous justice, brought a 
just judgment upon them, causing them to become a 
prey to the soldier, who in their piracies had made 
preys of so many families, and now with their bloods 
to answer the cruelties which they had exercised upon 
the lives of divers poor Protestants." 

A heavy hand was laid upon southern Ireland all 
through Cromwell's stay. Gowran was a strong 
castle, in command of a Kentishman, a principal actor 
in the Kentish insurrection of 1648. He returned a 
resolute refusal to Cromwell's invitation to surrender 
(March, 1650). The batteries were opened, and after 
a short parley a treaty was made, the soldiers to have 



CROMWELL IN IRELAND 293 

quarter, the officers to be treated as the victors might 
think fit. The next day the officers were shot, and a 
popish priest was hanged. In passing, we may ask in 
face of this hanging of chaplains and promiscuous 
knocking of friars on the head, what is the significance 
of CromweU's challenge to prochice "an instance of 
one man since my coming to Ireland, not in arms, 
massacred, destroyed, or banished?" 

The effect of the massacre of Drogheda was cer- 
tainly transient. As we have seen, it did not frighten 
the commandant at Wexford, and the resistance that 
Cromwell encountered during the winter at Ross, Dun- 
cannon, Waterford, Kilkenny, and Clonmel was just 
such as might have been looked for, if the garrison of 
Drogheda had been treated like a defeated garrison at 
Bristol, Taunton, or Reading. At Clonmel, which 
came last, resistance was most obdurate of all. The 
bloody lesson of Drogheda and Wexford had not been 
learned. "They found in Clonmel the stoutest enemy 
this army had ever met in Ireland ; and there never was 
seen so hot a storm, of so long continuance, and so gal- 
lantly defended, either in England or Ireland." Crom- 
well lost over two thousand men. The garrison 
running short of ammunition escaped in the night, and 
the subsequent surrender of the town (May 10, 1650) 
was no more than a husk without a kernel. 

The campaign made heavy demands upon the vigor 
of the Parliamentary force. A considerable part of 
the army was described as fitter for an hospital than 
a field. Not one officer in forty escaped the dysentery, 
which they called the disease of the country. Crom- 
well himself suffered a long attack of sickness. These 
distresses and difficulties much perplexed him. "In 
the midst of our good successes." he says, "wherein 
the kindness and mercy of God hath appeared, the 



294 OLIVER CROMWELL 

Lord in wisdom and for gracious ends best known to 
himself, hath interlaced some things which may give 
us cause of serious consideration what His mind there- 
in may be. . . . You see how God mingles out 
the cup unto us. Indeed, we are at this time a crazy 
company ; — yet we live in His sight, and shall w'ork the 
time that is appointed us, and shall rest after that in 
peace." 

His general policy is set out by Cromwell in a docu- 
ment of cardinal importance, and it sheds too much 
light upon his Irish policy to be passed over. The 
Catholic prelates met at Clonmacnoise, and issued a 
manifesto that only lives in history for the sake of 
Cromwell's declaration in reply to it (January, 1650). 
This has been called by our great transcendental eulo- 
gist one of the most remarkable state papers ever pub- 
lished in Ireland since Strongbow or even since St. 
Patrick. Perhaps it is, for it combines in a unique 
degree profound ignorance of the Irish past with a 
profound miscalculation of the Irish future. 'T will 
give you some wormwood to bite upon," says Oliver, 
and so he does. Yet it is easy now to see that the prel- 
ates were in fact, from the Irish point of view, hitting 
the nail upon the head, while Oliver goes to work with 
a want of insight and knowledge that puts his Irish 
statesmanship far below Strafford's. The prelates 
warned their flocks that union in their own ranks was 
the only thing that could frustrate the Parliamentary 
design to extirpate their religion, to massacre or banish 
the Catholic inhabitants, and to plant the land with 
English colonies. This is exactly what Clement 
Walker, the Puritan historian of Independency, tells 
us. "The Independents in the Parliament," he says, 
"insisted openly to have the papists of Ireland rooted 
out and their lands sold to adventurers." Meanwhile, 



CROMWELL IN IRELAND 295 

Oliver flies at them with extraordinary fire and energy 
of language, blazing with the polemic ot the time. 
After a profuse bestowal of truculent compliments, 
deepl}^ tinged with what in our days is known as the 
Orange hue, he comes to the practical matter in hand, 
but not until he has drawn one of the most daring of 
all the imaginary pictures that English statesmen have 
ever drawn of Ireland. "Remember, ye hypocrites, Ire- 
land was once united to England. Englishmen had 
good inheritances which many of them purchased with 
their money; they and their ancestors from you and 
your ancestors. They lived peaceably and honestly 
among you. You had generally equal benefit of the 
protection of England with them; and equal justice 
from the laws — saving what was necessary for the 
state, out of reasons of state, to put upon lew^ people 
apt to rebel upon the instigation of such as you. You 
broke this. You, unprovoked, put the English to the 
most unheard of, and most barbarous massacre that 
ever the sun beheld." 

As if Cromwell had not stood by the side of Pym in 
his denunciations of Strafford in all their excess and all 
their ignorance of Irish conditions, precisely for syste- 
matic violation of English law and the spirit of it 
throughout his long government of Ireland. As if 
Clare's famous sentence at the Union a hundred and 
fifty years later about confiscation being the common 
title, and the English settlement hemmed in on every 
side by the old inhabitants brooding over their discon- 
tents in sullen indignation, were at any time more true 
of Ireland than in these halcyon days of Cromwell's 
imagination. i\s if what he calls the equal benefit of 
the protection of England had meant anything but 
fraud, chicane, plunder, neglect and oppression, ending 
in that smoldering rage, misery, and despair which 



296 OLIVER CROMWELL 

Cromwell so ludicrously describes as the deep peace 
and union of a trancjuil sheepfold, only disturbed by 
the ravening greed of the priestly wolves of Rome. 

As for religion, after some thin and heated quibbling 
about the word "extirpate," he lets them know with all 
plainness what he means to do. "I shall not, where I 
have power, and the Lord is pleased to bless me, suffer 
the exercise of the Mass. Nor suffer you that are Pa- 
pists, where I can find you seducing the people, or by 
any overt act violating the laws established. As for the 
people, what thoughts in the matter of religion they 
have in their own breasts, I cannot reach ; but shall 
think it my duty, if they walk honestly and peaceably, 
not to cause them in the least to suffer for the same." 
To pretend that he was not "meddling with any man's 
conscience" when he prohibited the central rite of the 
Catholics, and all the ministrations by the clergy on 
those occasions of life where conscience under lawful 
penalties demanded them, was as idle as if the Cath- 
olics had pretended that they did not meddle with con- 
science if they forbade the possession or use of the 
Bible, or hunted Puritan preachers out of all the 
pulpits. 

"We come," he proceeds, "by the assistance of God 
to hold forth and maintain the luster and glory of Eng- 
lish liberty in a nation where we have an undoubted 
right to do it; wdierein the people of Ireland (if they 
listen not to such seducers as you are) may equally 
participate in all benefits; to use liberty and fortune 
ecjually with Englishmen if they keep out of arms." 
It is true enough that the military conquest of Ire- 
land was an indispensable preliminary to any healing 
policy. Nor in the prostrate and worn-out condition 
of Ireland after ten years of such confusion as has not 
often been seen on our planet, could military conquest 



CROMWELL IN IRELAND 297 

though tedious be difficuh. If the words just quoted 
were to have any meaning, Cromwell's policy, after 
the necessary subjugation of the country, ought to have 
been to see that the inhabitants of the country should 
enjoy both their religion and their lands in peace. If he 
had been strong enough and enlightened enough to try 
such a policy as this, there might have been a Cromwxl- 
lian settlement indeed. As it was, the stern and haughty 
assurances with which he wound up his declaration "for 
the Undeceiving of Deluded and Seduced People" were 
to receive a dreadful interpretation, and in this lies the 
historic pith of the whole transaction. 

The Long Parliament deliberately contemplated exe- 
cutions on so merciless a scale that it was not even 
practicable. But many hundreds were put to death. 
The same Parliament was originally responsible for 
the removal of the population, not so wholesale as is 
sometimes supposed, but still enormous. All this 
Cromwell sanctioned if he did not initiate. Confis- 
cation of the land proceeded over a vast area. Im- 
mense tracts were handed over to the adventurers who 
had advanced money to the government for the pur- 
poses of the war, and immense tracts to the Crom- 
wellian soldiery in discharge of arrears of pay. The 
old proprietors were transplanted with every circum- 
stance of misery to the province west of the Shannon, 
to the wasted and desperate wilds of Connaugl^t. 
Between thirty and forty thousand of the Irish were 
permitted to go to foreign countries, where they took 
service in the armies of Spain, France, Poland. When 
Jamaica was taken from Spain in 1655, Oliver, ardent 
for its successful plantation, requested Henry Crom- 
well, then in Ireland, to engage fifteen hundred sol- 
diers to settle, and to send a thousand Irishwomen 
with them ; and we know from Thurloe that ships were 



298 OLIVER CROMWELL 

made ready for the transportation of the boys and girls 
whom Henry was forcibly collecting. Whether the 
design was carried further we do not know. Strange 
to say, the massacre in the valleys of Piedmont in 
1655 increased the bitterness of the Dublin govern- 
ment and of the Protestant generals toward the un- 
happy Irish. Fleetwood says: "The officers of the 
army here are very sensible of the horrid cruelties in 
the massacre of the poor Protestants in the Duke of 
Savoy's dominions. ... It was less strange to 
us when we heard that the insatiable Irish had a 
hand in that bloodshed." The rigors of transplan- 
tation became more severe. Of all these doings in 
Cromwell's Irish chapter, each of us may say what he 
will. Yet to every one it will at least be intelligible 
how his name has come to be hated in the tenacious 
heart of Ireland. What is called his settlement aggra- 
vated Irish misery to a degree that cannot be measured, 
and before the end of a single generation events at 
Limerick and the Boyne showed how hollow and in- 
effectual, as well as how mischievous the Cromwellian 
settlement had been. Strafford too had aimed at the 
incorporation of Ireland with England, at plantation by 
English colonists, and at religious uniformity within 
a united realm. But Strafford had a grasp of the 
complications of social conditions in Ireland to which 
Cromwell could not pretend. He knew the need of 
time and management. A Puritan, armed with a mus- 
ket and the Old Testament, attempting to reconstruct 
the foundations of a community mainly Catholic, was 
sure to end in clumsy failure, and to this clumsy failure 
no appreciation of Oliver's greatness should blind 
rational men. One partial glimpse into the root of 
the matter he unmistakably had. "These poor people," 
he said (December, 1649), "have been accustomed to as 



CROMWELL IN IRELAND 299 

much injustice, tyranny, andoppression from their land- 
lords, the great men, and those who should have done 
them right, as any people in that which we call Christ- 
endom. Sir, if justice were freely and impartially 
administered here, the foregoing darkness and corrup- 
tion would make it look so much the more glorious and 
beautiful, and draw more hearts after it." This w^as 
Oliver's single glimpse of the main secret of the ever- 
lasting Irish question; it came to little, and no other 
English ruler had so much for many generations 
afterward. 



CHAPTER III 



IN SCOTLAND 



IT was the tnrn of Scotland next. There the Com- 
monweahh of England was wholly without friends. 
Religious sentiment and national sentiment, so far as 
in that country they can he conceived apart, combined 
against a government that in the first place sprang 
from the triumphs of Sectaries over Presbyterians, 
and the violent slaying of a lawful Scottish king; and, 
in the second place, had definitely substituted a prin- 
ciple of toleration for the milk of the covenanted word. 
The pure Royalist, the pure Covenanter, the men who 
were both Royalists and fervid Presbyterians, those 
who had gone with Montrose, those who went with 
Argyll, the Engagers whom Cromwell had routed at 
Preston, Whiggamores, nobles, and clergy all abhorred 
the new English system which dispelled at the same 
time both golden dreams of a Presbyterian king ruling 
over a Presbyterian people, and constitutional visions 
of the sway of the legitimate line. The spirit of intes- 
tine faction was redhot, but the wiser Scots knew by 
instinct that the struggle before them was at bottom 
as much a struggle for independent national existence, 
as it had been in the days of Wallace and Bruce. 
Equally the statesmen of the Commonwealth felt the 
impossibility of establishing their own rule over the 
host of malcontents in England, until they had sup- 

300 



IN SCOTLAND 301 

pressed a hostile Scotland. The alliance between the 
two neighboring nations which ten years before had 
arisen from religious feeling in one and military needs 
in the other, had now by slow stages become a struggle 
for national predominance and a great consolidated 
state. The proclamation of Charles II at Edinburgh, 
the long negotiations with him in Holland, his surren- 
der to the inexorable demand that he should censure 
his father for resisting the Reformation, and his mother 
for being an idolatress, that he should himself turn 
Covenanter, and finally his arrival on the soil of Scot- 
land, all showed that no time was to be lost if the union 
of the kingdoms was to be saved. 

An express messenger was sent to Ireland by the 
Council of State in March (1650) to let Cromwell 
know that affairs were urgent, and that they desired 
his presence and assistance. He did not arrive until 
the first of June. He was saluted with joyful accla- 
mation on every side, from the magnanimous Fairfax 
down to the multitudes that thronged the approaches to 
Westminster. Both Parliament and the City gave him 
formal thanks for his famous services in Ireland ; 
which being added to the laurels of his English vic- 
tories, "crowned him in the opinion of all the world for 
one of the wisest and most accomplished leaders among 
the present and past generations."' As against a 
popish Ireland, all English parties were united. 

It was now that Fairfax, the brave and skilful com- 
mander, but too wanting in the sovereign cjualities of 
decision and initiative to guide the councils of a revo- 
lution, disappeared from conspicuous place. While 
Cromwell was in Ireland, Fairfax had still retained 
the office of lord-general, and Cromwell himself was 
now undoubtedly sincere in his urgency that the old 
arrangement should continue. Among other reasons 



302 OLIVER CROMWELL 

the presence of Fairfax was a satisfaction to that Pres- 
byterian interest against whose active enmity the Com- 
monwealth could hardly stand. Fairfax had always 
shown himself a man of scruple. After a single at- 
tendance he had absented himself from the trial of the 
king, and in the same spirit of scruple he refused the 
command of the army destined for the invasion of Scot- 
land, on the ground that invasion would be a breach 
of the Solemn League and Covenant. Human prob- 
abilities, he said, are not sufficient ground to make war 
upon a neighbor nation. The point may seem minute 
in modern eyes ; but in Fairfax at least moral punctilio 
had no association with disloyalty either to his 
powerful comrade or to the Commonwealth. Crom- 
well was at once (June 26) appointed to be captain- 
general and commander-in-chief. 

The Scottish case was essentially different from the 
case of Ireland, and the national quarrel was definitely 
described by Oliver. To Ireland he had gone to ex- 
act vengeance, to restore some sort of framework to a 
society shattered even to dissolution, and to wage war 
against the practice of a hated creed. Very dift'erent 
from his truculence against Irish prelates was his ear- 
nest appeal to the General Assembly in Scotland. "I 
beseech you," he said, — enjoining a lesson that of all 
lessons mankind are everywhere least willing to learn, 
— "I beseech you, think it possible you may be mis- 
taken." He protested that they wished well to the 
honest people of Scotland as to their own souls, "it 
being no part of our business to hinder any of them 
from worshiping God in that way they are satisfied in 
their conscience by the word of God they ought." It 
was the political incoherencies of the Scots that forced 
the war upon England. They pretended, he told them, 
that to impose a king upon England was the cause of 



IN SCOTLAND 303 

God, and the satisfaction of God's people in both coun- 
tries. Yet this king, who now professed to submit to 
the covenant, had at that very moment a popish army 
fighting under his orders in Ireland. 

The political exposure was unanswerable, and Crom- 
well spared no trouble to bring it home to the minds 
of the godly. But the clergy hindered the passage of 
these things to the hearts of those to whom he intended 
them — a deceived clergy, "meddling with worldly poli- 
cies and mixtures of earthly power, to set up that 
which they call the Kingdom of Christ." Theirs was 
no Kingdom of Christ, and if it were, no such means 
as worldly policy would be effectual to set it up : it is 
the sword of the Spirit alone that is powerful for the 
setting up of that kingdom. This mystic spirituality, 
ever the indwelling essence of Cromwell's faith, struck 
no response in the dour ecclesiastics to whom he was 
speaking. However all this might be, the battle must 
be fought. To have a king imposed by Scotland 
would be better than one imposed by Ireland, but if 
malignants were destined to win, it were better to have 
a restoration by English cavaliers than by Scottish 
Presbyters, inflamed by spiritual pride and sodden in 
theological arrogance. At a critical hour, six years 
later, Cromwell deprecated despondency, and the argu- 
ment was as good now as then. "We are English- 
men; that is one good fact. And if God gave a 
nation valor and courage, it is honor and a mercy." 
It was upon this national valor and courage that he 
now counted, and the crowning mercy of Worcester 
in the autumn of 165 1 justified him. But many 
sombre episodes intervened. 

Cromwell (July 22) crossed the northern border 
with a force of some sixteen thousand men. For five 
weeks, until the end of August, he was involved in a 



304 OLIVER CROMWELL 

series of manoeuvers, extremely complicated in detail, 
and turning on a fruitless attempt to draw the Scots 
out of a strong and skilfully entrenched position in 
Edinburgh, and to force them to an engagement in the 
open. The general was David Leslie, who six years 
ago had rendered such valiant and timely service on 
the day of Marston Moor. He knew that time, 
weather, and scarcity of supplies must wear Cromwell 
out and compel him to recross the border, and Leslie's 
skill and steadfastness, in the absence of any of those 
rapid and energetic blows that usually marked Crom- 
well's operations, ended in complete success. "There 
is an impossibility," said Fleetwood, "in our forcing 
them to fight — the passes being so many and so great 
that as soon as we go on the one side, they go over on 
the other." The English force retreated to Dunbar, a 
shattered, hungry, discouraged host now some ten or 
eleven thousand in number. Leslie, with a force twice 
as numerous, bent southward to the hills that over- 
look Dunbar, and there Cromwell was hemmed in. The 
Scots were in high spirits at thus cutting him off from 
Berwick. "In their presumption and arrogance they 
had disposed of us and of their business, in sufficient re- 
venge and wrath toward our persons ; and had swal- 
lowed up the poor interest of England ; believing that 
their army and their king would have marched to Lon- 
don without any interruption." This was indeed the 
issue — a king restored by the Ultras of the Scottish 
church, with a new struggle in England between Ma- 
lignants and Presbyterians to follow after. "We lay 
very near him," says Oliver, "being sensible of our dis- 
advantage, having some weakness of flesh, but yet con- 
solation and support from the Lord himself to our poor 
weak faith. That because of their numbers, because 
of their advantage, because of their confidence, because 




From a print in the British Museum of a portrait by Sir Peter Lely, in the 
collection of the Duke of Hamilton. 



DAVID LESLIE, FIRST LORD NEWARK. 



IN SCOTLAND 305 

of our weakness, because of our strait, we were in the 
Mount, and in the Mount of the Lord he would be seen ; 
and that he would find a way of deliverance and salva- 
tion for us ; and indeed we had our consolations and our 
hopes." This was written after the event; but a note 
written on September 2d to the governor of Newcastle, 
shows with even more reality into how desperate a 
position he felt chat Leslie's generalship had driven 
him. "We are upon an engagement very difficult. 
The enemy hath blocked up our way at the Pass at 
Copperspath, through which we cannot get without 
almost a miracle. He lieth so upon the hills, that we 
know not how to come that way without great diffi- 
culty; and our lying here daily consumeth our men, 
who fall sick beyond imagination. Whatever becomes 
of us, it will be well for you to get what forces you can 
together; and the south to help what they can. The 
business nearly concerneth all good people. If your 
forces had been here in a readiness to have fallen upon 
the back of Copperspath, it might have occasioned sup- 
plies to come to us. All shall work for good. Our 
spirits are comfortable, praised be the Lord — though 
our present condition be as it is." History possesses 
no finer picture of the fortitude of the man of action, 
with eyes courageously open to dark facts closing 
round him, yet with alacrity, vigilance, and a kind of 
cheerful hope, taking thought for every detail of the 
business of the day. Where the purpose is lofty and 
unselfish, this is indeed moral greatness. 

Whether Leslie's idea was to allow the English to 
retreat until they were engaged in the pass, and then 
to fall upon them in the rear; or to drive them slowly 
across the border in humiliation and disgrace, we can- 
not tell. No more can we tell for certain whether 
Cromwell still held to his first project of fortifying 



306 OLIVER CROMWELL 

Dunbar, or intended at all costs to cut his way through. 
Leslie had naturally made up his mind that the English 
must either mo\-e or surrender, and in either case if 
he remained on the heights victory was his. Unluck- 
ily for him. he was forced from his resolve, either by 
want of water, provisions, and shelter for his force, or 
else by the impatience of his committee, mainly min- 
isters, who were weary of his triumphant Fabian 
strategy, and could not restrain their exultation at the 
sight of the hated Sectaries lying entrapped at their 
feet, shut in between the sea at their back and a force 
twice as strong as them in front, w'ith another force 
cutting them off from the south in a position that one 
man could hold against forty. Their minds were full 
of Saul, Amalekites, Moabites, the fords of Jordan, 
and all the rest of it, just as Oliver was full of the 
Mount of the Lord, taking care, however, never to let 
texts do duty for tactics. In an evil moment on the 
morning of September 26. the Scots began to descend 
the hill and to extend themselves on the ledge of a 
marshy glen at the foot. Cromwell walking about with 
Lambert, with a watchful eye for the hills, discerned 
the unexpected motions. ''I told the major-general," 
says Cromwell, "I thought it did give us an opportunity 
and advantage to attempt upon the enemy. To which 
he immediately replied, that he had thought to have 
said the same thing to me. So that it pleased the Lord 
to set this apprehension upon both of our hearts at the 
instant." They called for Monk; then going to their 
quarters at night they all held a council of war, and 
explained their plans to some of the colonels, and these 
cheerfully concurred. Leslie's move must mean either 
an immediate attack, or a closer blockade; in either 
case, the only chance was to be first to engage. They 
determined to fall on at daybreak, though as it hap- 



IN SCOTLAND 307 

pened the battle did not open before six (September 3). 
The weather was wet and stormy. The voice of 
prayer and preaching sounding through the night- 
watches showed the piety and confirmed the confidence 
of the Enghsh troopers. The Scots sought shelter 
behind the shocks of corn, against the wind and rain 
from the sea, instead of obeying the orders to stand to 
their arms. 'Tt was our own laziness," said Leslie; 
'T take God to witness that we might have as easily 
beaten them as we did James Graham at Philiphaugh, 
if the officers had stayed by their troops and regi- 
ments." 

The English and the Scots faced one another across 
a brook with steep banks, only passable at a narrow 
ford, and here the fight was. The rout of Dunbar has 
been described once for all by Carlyle, in one of the 
famous masterpieces of modern letters, with a force of 
imagination, a faithfulness in detail, a moral depth, a 
poetic beauty, that help to atone for the perplexing 
humors and whimsical philosophies that mar that fine 
biography. It is wuse for others not to attempt to turn 
into poetry the prose of politics and war. The battle 
opened with a cannonade from the English guns, fol- 
lowed by a charge of horse under Lambert. The 
enemy wxre in a good position, had the advantage of 
guns and foot against Lambert's horse, and at first 
had the best of it in the struggle. Before the English 
foot could come up, Cromwell says, "the enemy made 
a gallant resistance, and there was a very hot dispute 
at swords' point between our horse and theirs." Then 
the first line of foot came up, and "after they had dis- 
charged their duty (being overpowered with the 
enemy) received some repulse which they soon re- 
covered. For my own regiment did come seasonably 
in, and at the push of pike d^d repel the stoutest regi- 



3o8 OLIVER CROMWELL 

ment the enemy had there, which proved a great 
amazement to the residue of their foot. The horse in 
the meantime did with a great deal of courage and 
spirit beat back aU opposition; charging through the 
bodies of the enemy's horse and of their foot; who 
were after the first repulse given, made by the Lord 
of Hosts as stubble to their swords. The best of the 
enemy's horse being broken through and through in 
less than an hour's dispute, their whole army being put 
into confusion, it became a total rout, our men having 
the chase and execution of them near eight miles." 

Such is the whole story of this memorable hour's 
fight as told by the victor. Rushworth, then Crom- 
well's secretary, is still more summary. "About twilight 
the general advanced with the army, and charged them 
both in the valley and on the hill. The battle was 
very fierce for the time ; one part of their battalion 
stood very stiffly to it, but the rest was presently 
routed. I never beheld a more terrible charge of foot 
than was given by our army ; our foot alone making 
the Scots foot give ground for three quarters of a mile 
together." Whether the business was finally done by 
Lambert's second charge of horse after his first repulse, 
or whether Cromwell turned the day by a flank move- 
ment of his own, the authorities do not enable us to 
settle. The best of them says this : "The day broke, 
and we in disorder, and the major-general (Lambert) 
a-wanting, being ordering the guns. The general was 
impatient; the Scots a-preparing to make the attempt 
upon us, sounding a trumpet, but soon desisted. At 
last the major-general came, and ordered Packer, 
major to the general's regiment, Cough's and our two 
foot regiments to march about Roxburgh, House to- 
ward the sea, and so to fall upon the enemy's flank, 
which was done with a great deal of resolution; and 




From the original portrait at Chequers Court, by permission of 
Mrs. Frankland-Russell-Astley. 

GENERAL JOHN LAMBERT. 



IN SCOTLAND 309 

one of the Scots brigades of foot would not yield, 
though at push of pike and butt-end of musket, until a 
troop of our horse charged from one end to another of 
them, and so left them at the mercy of the foot. The 
general himself comes in the rear of our regiment, and 
commands to incline to the left; that was to take more 
ground, to be clear of all bodies. And we did so, and 
horse and foot were engaged all over the field ; and the 
Scots all in confusion. And the sun appearing upon 
the sea, I heard Noll say, 'Now let God arise, and his 
enemies shall be scattered' ; and he following us as we 
slowly marched, I heard him say, T profess they run !' 
and then was the Scots army all in disorder and running, 
both right wing and left and main battle. They had 
routed one another after we had done their work on 
their right wing; and we coming up to the top of the 
hill with the straggling parties that had been engaged, 
kept them from bodying." 

Cromwell's gazette was peculiar, perhaps not with- 
out a moral for later days. "Both your chief com- 
manders and others in their several places, and soldiers 
also were acted (actuated) with as much courage as 
ever hath been seen in any action since this war. I 
know they look not to be named, and therefore I for- 
bear particulars." Nor is a word said about the pre- 
cise part taken by himself. An extraordinary fact 
about the drove of Dunbar is that though the battle was 
so fierce, at such close quarters, and lasted more than 
an hour, yet the English did not lose thirty men, or 
even as Oliver says in another place, not twenty. 
They killed three thousand, and took ten thousand 
prisoners. 



CHAPTER IV 

FROM DUNBAR TO WORCESTER 

FOR nearly a year after the victory at Dunbar Crom- 
well remained in Scotland, and for five months of 
the year, with short intervals followed by relapses, he 
suffered from an illnesss from which he thought he 
should die. On the day after Dunbar he wrote to his 
wife: "My weak faith hath been upheld. I have been 
in my inward man marvelously supported, though I 
assure thee I grow an old man and feel infirmities of 
age marvelously stealing upon me. Would my cor- 
ruptions did as fast decrease." He was only fifty 
3'ears old, but for the last eight years his labors, hard- 
ships, privations, and anxieties had been incessant and 
severe. The winter in Ireland had brought on a long 
and sharp attack of feverish ague. The climate of 
Scotland agreed with him no better. The bafiled 
marches and counter-marches that preceded Dunbar, 
in dreadful weather and along miry ways, may well 
have depressed his vital energies. His friends in Lon- 
don took alarm (February, 1656), and Parliament 
despatched two physicians from London to see him, 
and even made an order allowing him to return into 
England for change of air. Of this unsolicited per- 
mission he did not avail himself. 

Both the political and the military operations in 
Scotland between Dunbar and Worcester are as intricate 

310 



FROM DUNBAR TO WORCESTER 311 

a tangle as any in Cromwell's career. The student 
who unravels them in detail may easily convince us 
what different results might have followed, if 
military tactics had heen other than they were, or if 
religious quarrels had been less vivid and less stub- 
born. The general outline is fairly plain. As Ranke 
says, the struggle was not between two ordinary 
armies, but two politico-religious sects. On both sides 
they professed to be zealous Protestants. On both 
sides they professed their conviction of the immediate 
intervention of Providence in their affairs. On both 
sides a savory text made an unanswerable argument, 
and English and Scots in the seventeenth century of 
the Christian era found their morals and their politics 
in the tribal warfare of the Hebrews of the old dis- 
pensation. The English likened themselves to Israel 
against Benjamin ; and then to Joshua against the 
Canaanites. The Scots repaid in the same scriptural 
coin. The quarrel was whether they should have a 
king or not, and whether there should be a ruling 
church or not. The rout of Leslie at Dunbar had 
thrown the second of these issues into a secondary 
place. 

In vain did Cromwell, as his fashion was, appeal to 
the testimony of results. He could not comprehend 
how men worshiping the God of Israel, and thinking 
themselves the chosen people, could so perversely ig- 
nore the moral of Dunbar, and the yet more eminent 
witness of the Lord against the family of Charles for 
blood-guiltiness. The churchmen haughtily replied 
they had not learned to hang the equity of their cause 
upon events. "Events," retorted Oliver, with a scorn 
more fervid than their own; "what blindness on your 
eyes to all those marvelous dispensations lately wrought 
in England. But did you not solemnly appeal and 



312 OLIVER CROMWELL 

pray? Did we not do so too? And ought not you 
and we to think with fear and trembHng of the hand 
of the great God in this mighty and strange appearance 
of his, instead of shghtly calhng it 'an event.' Were 
not both your and our expectations renewed from 
time to time, whilst we waited upon God, to see which 
way he would manifest himself upon our appeals? 
And shall we after all these our prayers, fastings, tears, 
expectations, and solemn appeals, call these bare 
'events'? The Lord pity you." 

After bitter controversies that propagated them- 
selves in Scotland for generations to come, after all 
the strife between Remonstrants, Resolutioners, and 
Protesters, and after a victory by Lambert over the 
zealots of the west, Scottish policy underwent a 
marked reaction. Argyll, the shifty and astute oppor- 
tunist, who had attempted to combine fierce Covenan- 
ters with moderate Royalists, lost his game. The 
fanatical clergy had been brought down from the mas- 
tery which they had so arrogantly abused. The nobles 
and gentry regained their ascendancy. The king 
found a large force at last in line upon his side, and saw 
a chance of throwing off the yoke of his Presbyterian 
tyrants. All the violent and confused issues, political 
and religious, had by the middle of 165 1 become sim- 
plified into the one question of a Royalist restoration 
to the throne of the two kingdoms. 

The headquarters of the Scots were at Stirling, and 
here David Leslie repeated the tactics that had been so 
triumphant at Edinburgh. Well entrenched within a 
region of marsh and moorland, he baffled all Oliver's 
attempts to dislodge him or to open the way to Stirling. 
The English invaders were again to be steadily wearied 
out. Cromwell says, "We were gone as far as we could 
in our counsel and action, and we did say to one an- 



FROM DUNBAR TO WORCESTER 313 

other, we knew not what to do." The enemy was at 
his ''old lock," and with abundant supphes from the 
north. *Tt is our business still to wait upon God, to 
show us our w^ay how to deal with this subtle enemy, 
which I hope He will." Meanwhile, like the diligent 
man of business that every good general must be, he 
sends to the Council of State for more arms, more 
spades and tools, more saddles and provisions, and 
more men, especially volunteers rather than pressed 
men. His position w^as not so critical as on the eve of 
Dunbar, but it was vexatious. There was always the 
risk of the Scots retiring in detached parties to the 
Highlands and so prolonging the w^ar. On the other 
hand, if he did not succeed in dislodging the king from 
Stirling, he must face another winter wath all the diffi- 
culties of climate and health for his soldiers, and all 
the expense of English treasure for the government at 
Whitehall. For many weeks he had been revolving- 
plans for outflanking Stirling by an expedition 
through Fife, and cutting the king off from his north- 
ern resources. In this plan also there was the risk 
that a march in force northward left the road to Eng- 
land open, if the Scots in their desperation and fear 
and inevitable necessity should try what they could do 
in this way. In July Cromwell came at length to a 
decision. He despatched Lambert with four thousand 
men across the Forth to the shores of Fife, and after 
Lambert had overcome the stout resistance of a force 
of Scots of about equal numbers at Inverkeithing, 
Cromwell transported the main body of his army on 
to the same ground, and the whole force passing Stir- 
ling on the left advanced north as far as Perth. Here 
Cromwell arrived on August ist, and the City was sur- 
rendered to him on the following day. This move 
placed the king and his force in the desperate dilemma 



314 OLIVER CROMWELL 

that had been foreseen. Their supphes would be cut 
off, their men were beginning to desert, and the Eng- 
lish were ready to close. Their only choice lay between 
a hopeless engagement in the open about Stirling, and a 
march to the south. "We must," said one of them, 
"either starve, disband, or go with a handful of men into 
England. This last seems to be the least ill, yet it ap- 
pears very desperate." That was the way they chose; 
they started forth (July 31) for the invasion of Eng- 
land. Cromwell, hearing the momentous news, acted 
with even more than his usual swiftness, and having 
taken Perth on August 2d, was back again at 
Leith two days later, and off from Leith in 
pursuit two days after his arrival there. The chase 
lasted a month. Charles and twenty thousand Scots 
took the western road, as Hamilton had done in 1648. 
England was, in Cromwell's phrase, much more un- 
steady in Hamilton's time than now, and the Scots 
tramped south from Carlisle to Worcester without any 
signs of that eager rising against the Commonwealth 
on which they had professed to count. They found 
themselves foreigners among stolid and scowling 
natives. The Council of State responded to Crom- 
well's appeal with extraordinary vigilance, fore- 
thought, and energy. They despatched letters to the 
militia commissioners over England, urging them to 
collect forces and to have them in the right places. 
They dwelt on the king's mistaken calculations, how 
the counties, instead of assisting him everywhere with 
the cheerfulness on which he was reckoning, had united 
against him ; and how, after all his long march, scarcely 
anybody joined him, "except such whose other crimes 
seek shelter there, by the addition of that one more." 
The lord-general, making his way south in hard 
marches by Berwick, York, Nottingham, was forced to 



FROM DUNBAR TO WORCESTER 315 

leave not a few of his veterans on the way, worn out 
hy sickness and the hardships of the last winter's cam- 
paign in Scotland. These the Council directed should 
be specially refreshed and tended. 

Cromwell's march from Perth to Worcester, and 
the combinations incident to it, have excited the warm 
admiration of the military critics of our own time. 
The precision of his operations would be deemed re- 
markable even in the days of the telegraph, and their 
success testifies to Cromwell's extraordinary sureness 
in all that concerned the movements of horse, as well 
as to the extraordinary military talent of Lambert, on 
which he knew that he could safely reckon. Harrison, 
who had instantly started after the Scottish invaders 
upon his left flank, and Lambert, whom Cromwell 
ordered to hang upon their rear, effected a junction on 
August 13th. Cromwell, marching steadily on a line 
to the east, and receiving recruits as he advanced (from 
Fairfax in Yorkshire among others), came up with 
Lambert's column on August 24th. Fleetwood joined 
them with the forces of militia newly collected in the 
south. Thus three separate corps, starting from three 
different bases and marching at long distances from 
one another, converged at the right point, and four 
days later the whole army, some thirty thousand strong, 
lay around Worcester. "Not Napoleon, not Moltke, 
could have done better"' (Honig, IIL, p. 136). The 
energy of the Council of State, the skill of Lambert 
and Harrison, and above all the stanch aversion of the 
population from the invaders, had hardly less to do 
with the result than the strategy of Oliver. 

It was indispensable that Cromwell's force should 
be able to operate at once on both banks of the Severn. 
Fleetwood succeeded in crossing Upton Bridge from 
the left bank to the right, seven miles below Worcester, 



3i6 OLIVER CROMWELL 

thus securing access to both banks. About midway 
between Worcester and Upton, the tributary Teme 
flows into the Severn, and the decisive element in the 
struggle consisted in laying two bridges of boats, one 
across the Teme, and the other across the Severn, both 
of them close to the junction of the broader stream 
with the less. This was the work of the afternoon of 
September 3d, the anniversary of Dunbar, and it be- 
came possible for the Cromwellians to work freely 
with a concentrated force on either left bank or right. 
The battle was opened by Fleetwood after he had 
transported one of his wrings by the bridge of boats 
over the Teme, and the other by Powick Bridge, a 
short distance up the stream on the left. As soon as 
Fleetwood advanced to the attack, the Scots on the 
right bank of the Severn offered a strong resistance. 
Cromwell passed a mixed force of horse and foot over 
his Severn Bridge to the relief of Fleetwood. To- 
gether they beat the enemy from hedge to hedge, till 
they beat him into Worcester. The scene then 
changed to the left bank. Charles, from the cathedral 
tower observing that Cromwell's main force was en- 
gaged in the pursuit of the Scots betw^een the Teme and 
the city, drew all his men together and sallied out on 
the eastern side. Here they pressed as hard as they 
could upon the reserve that Cromwell had left behind 
him before joining Fleetwood. He now in all haste 
recrossed the Severn, and a furious engagement fol- 
lowed, lasting for three hours at close quarters and 
often at push of pike and from defense to defense. The 
end was the "total defeat and ruin of the enemy's 
army ; and a possession of the town, our men entering 
at the enemy's heels and fighting with them in the 
streets with very great courage." The Scots fought 
with desperate tenacity. The carnage was what it 




From a miniature on ivory in the collection of Sir Richard Tangye. 
MAJOR-GENERAL CHARLES FLEETWOOD. 



FROM DUNBAR TO WORCESTER 317 

always is in street warfare. Some three thousand 
men lay dead ; twice or even three times as many were 
taken prisoners, including most of the men of high 
station ; Charles was a fugitive. Not many of the 
Scots ever saw their homes again. 

Such was the battle of Worcester, as stiff a contest, 
says the victor, as ever I have seen. It was Oliver's 
last battle, the "Crowning Mercy." In what sense 
did this great military event deserve so high a title? 
It has been said, that as military commander Crom- 
well's special work was not the overthrow of Charles 
I, but the rearrangement of the relations of the three 
kingdoms. Such a distinction is arbitrary or para- 
doxical. Neither at Naseby and Preston, nor at 
Dunbar and Worcester, was any indelible stamp im- 
pressed upon the institutions of the realm; no real in- 
corporation of Ireland and Scotland took place or was 
then possible. Here, as elsewiiere, what Cromwell's 
military genius and persistency secured by the subju- 
gation alike of king and kingdoms, was that the waves 
of anarchy should not roll over the work, and that 
enough of the conditions of unity and order should 
be preserved to ensure national safety and progress 
when affairs returned to their normal course. In Ire- 
land this provisional task was so ill comprehended as 
to darken all the future. In Scotland its immediate 
and positive results were transient, but there at least 
no barriers were raised against the happier relations 
that were to come after. 



CHAPTER V 

CIVIL PROBLEMS AND THE SOLDIER 

WHEN God, said Milton, has given victory to the 
cause, "then comes the task to those worthies 
which are the soul of that enterprise to be sweated and 
labored out amidst the throng and noises of vulgar and 
irrational men." Often in later days Cromwell used 
to declare that after the triumph of the cause at Wor- 
cester, he would fain have withdrawn from promi- 
nence and power. These signs of fatigue in strong men 
are often sincere and always vain. Outer circumstance 
prevents withdrawal, and the inspiring demon of 
the mind within prevents it. This was the climax of 
his glory. Nine years had gone since conscience, 
duty, his country, the cause of civil freedom, the cause 
of sacred truth and of the divine purpose, had all, as 
he believed, summoned him to arms. With miracu- 
lous constancy victory had crowned his standards. 
Unlike Conde, or Turenne, or almost any general that 
has ever lived, he had in all these years of incessant 
warfare never suffered a defeat. The rustic captain of 
horse was lord-general of the army that he had brought 
to be the best disciplined force in Europe. It was now 
to be seen whether the same genius and the same for- 
tune would mark his handling of civil affairs and the 
ship of state plunging among the breakers. It was 
certain that he would be as active and indefatigable in 

318 



CIVIL PROBLEMS 319 

peace as he had proved himself in war; that energy 
would never fail, even if depth of counsel often failed; 
that strenuous watchfulness would never relax, even 
though calculations went again and again amiss ; that 
it would still be true of him to the end, that he was a 
strong man, and in the deep perils of war, in the high 
places of the field, hope shone in him like a pillar of 
fire when it had gone out in all others. A spirit of 
confident hope, and the halo of past success — these are 
two of the manifold secrets of a great man's power, 
and a third is a certain moral unity that impresses him 
on others as a living whole. Cromwell possessed all 
three. Whether he had the other gifts of a wise ruler 
in a desperate pass, only time could show. 

The victorious general had a triumphant return. 
The Parliament sent five of its most distinguished 
members to greet him on his march, voted him a grant 
of £4000 a year in addition to £2500 voted the year 
before, and they gave him Hampton Court as a coun- 
try residence. He entered the metropolis, accom- 
panied not only by the principal officers of the army, 
but by the Speaker, the Council of State, the Lord 
Mayor, the aldermen and sheriffs, and many thousand 
other persons of quality, while an immense multitude 
received the conqueror of Ireland and Scotland with 
volleys of musketry and loud rejoicing. In the midst 
of acclamations that Cromwell took for no more than 
the}' were worth, it was observed that he bore himself 
with great affability and seeming humility. With a 
touch of the irony that was rare in him, but can never 
be wholly absent in any that meddle with affairs of 
politics and party, he remarked that there would have 
been a still mightier crowd to see him hanged. When- 
ever Worcester was talked of, he never spoke of him- 
self, but talked of the gallantry of his comrades, and 



320 OLIVER CROMWELL 

gave the glory to God. Yet there were those who 
said "this man will make himself our king," and in 
days to come his present modesty was set down to 
craft. For it is one of the elements in the poverty of 
human nature that as soon as people see a leader know- 
ing how to calculate, they slavishly assume that the 
aim of his calculations can be nothing else than his own 
interest. Cromwell's moderation was in truth the 
natural bearing of a man massive in simplicity, purged 
of self, and who knew far too well how many circum- 
stances work together for the unfolding of great 
events, to dream of gathering all the credit to a single 
agent. 

Bacon in a single pithy sentence had, in 1606, fore- 
shadowed the whole policy of the Commonwealth of 
1650. This Kingdom of England, he told the House 
of Commons, "having Scotland united, Ireland re- 
duced, the sea provinces of the Low Countries con- 
tracted, and shipping maintained, is one of the greatest 
monarchies in forces truly esteemed that hath been in 
the world." The Commonwealth on Cromwell's re- 
turn from the "Crowning Mercy" had lasted for two 
years and a half (February i, 1649 — September, 
1651). During this period its existence had been 
saved mainly by Cromwell's victorious suppression of 
its foes in Ireland and in Scotland, and partly by cir- 
cumstances in France and Spain that hindered either of 
the two great monarchies of western Europe from 
armed intervention on behalf of monarchy in England. 
Its Protestantism had helped to shut out the fallen 
sovereignty from the active sympathy of the sacred 
circle of Catholic kings. Cromwell's military success 
in the outlying kingdoms was matched by correspond- 
ing progress achieved through the energy and policy of 
the civil srovernment at Westminster. At Christmas, 



CIVIL PROBLEMS 321 

1650, or less than two years after the execution of 
Charles, an ambassador from the King of Spain was 
received in audience by the Parliament, and presented 
his credentials to the Speaker. France, torn by in- 
testine discord and with a more tortuous game to play, 
was slower, but in the winter of 1652 the Common- 
wealth was duly recognized by the government of 
Louis XIV, the nephew of the king whom the leaders 
of the Commonwealth had slain. 

Less than justice has usually been done to the bold 
and skilful exertions by which the Council of State 
had made the friendship of England an object of keen 
desire both to France and to Spain. The creation of 
the navy, by which Blake and other of the amphibious 
sea-generals won some of the proudest victories in all 
the annals of English seamanship, was not less strik- 
ing and hardly less momentous than the creation of the 
army of the New Model. For the first time, says 
Ranke, since the days of the Plantagenets an English 
fleet was seen in the Mediterranean, and Blake, who 
had never been on the quarter-deck of a man-of-war 
until he was fifty, was already only second in renown to 
Oliver himself. The task of maritime organization 
was carried through by the vigor, insight, and adminis- 
trative talents of Vane and the other men of the Parlia- 
ment, who are now so often far too summarily de- 
spatched as mere egotists and pedants. By the time that 
Cromwell had effected the subjugation of Ireland which 
Ireton. Ludlow, and Fleetwood completed, and the sub- 
jugation of Scotland which Monk and Deane com- 
pleted, he found that the Council of State had been as 
active in suppressing the piratical civil war waged by 
Rupert at sea, as he himself had been with his iron vet- 
erans on land. What was more, they had opened a mo- 
mentous chapter of maritime and commercial policy. 



322 OLIVER CROMWELL 

111 will had sprung up early between the Dutch and 
English republics, partly from the dynastic relations 
between the house of Stuart and the house of Orange, 
partly from repugnance in Holland to the shedding of 
the blood of King Charles, and most of all from the 
keen instincts of commercial rivalry. It has been justly 
remarked as extraordinary that the two republics, 
threatened both of them by Stuart interests, by Catho- 
lic interests, and by France, should now for the first 
time make war on each other. In the days of their 
struggle with Spain the Dutch did their best to per- 
suade Queen Elizabeth to accept their allegiance and 
to incorporate the L'nited Provinces in the English 
realm. Now it was statesmen of the English Com- 
monwealth who dreamed of adding the Dutch Republic 
to the union of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Of 
this dream in shape so definite nothing could come, and 
even minor projects of friendship were not discussed 
without a degree of friction that speedily passed into 
downright animosity. To cripple the naval power of 
Holland would at once satisfy the naval pride of the 
new Commonwealth, remove a source of military dan- 
ger, and exalt the maritime strength and the commer- 
cial greatness of England. The Navigation Act of 
165 1 was passed, the one durable moment of republican 
legislation. By this famous measure goods were only 
to be admitted into England either in English ships, 
or else in ships of the country to which the goods 
belonged. Whatever else came of it — and its effects 
to the direct and indirect were deep and far-reaching 
for many years to come — the Navigation Act made 
a breach in the Dutch monopoly of the world's 
carrying trade. An unfriendly Holland seemed as 
direct a peril as the enmity of France or Spain, and 
before long it was perceived how easily a combination 



CIVIL, PROBLEMS 323 

between Holland and Denmark, by closing the gates of 
the Baltic, might exclude England from free access to 
the tar, cordage, and the other prime requisites for the 
building and rigging of her ships. The blow at the 
Dutch trade monopoly was a fresh irritant to Dutch 
pride, already embittered by the English claim to 
supremacy and the outward symbols of supremacy in 
the narrow seas, as well as to a right of seizure of the 
goods of enemies in neutral ships. War followed 
(1652) and was prosecuted by the Commonwealth 
with intrepidity, decision, and vigor not unworthy of 
the ancient Senate of Rome at its highest. Cromwell 
had little share, so far as we are able to discern, in this 
memorable attempt to found the maritime ascendancy 
of England; that renown belongs to Vane, the organ- 
izer, and to Blake, Deane, and Monk, the sea-generals. 

To Cromwell for the time a war between two Prot- 
estant republics seemed a fratricidal war. It was in 
conflict with that ideal of religious union and Eng- 
land's place in Europe, which began to ripen in his 
mind as soon. as the stress of war left his imagination 
free to survey the larger world. Apart from this, he 
grudged its consumption of treasure, and the vast bur- 
den that it laid upon the people. He set the charge at 
£120,000 a month, or as much as the whole of the taxes 
came to, and there was besides the injury done by war 
to trade. The sale of church lands, king's lands, and 
delinquent's lands did not suffice to fill the gulf. Em- 
barrassed finance as usual deepened popular discontent^ 
heightened the unpopularity of the government, and 
put off the day of social and political consolidation. 
Events or visions were by-and-by to alter Cromwell's 
mind, not for the better. 

In the settlement of the nation no progress was 
made. Dangerous reefs still showed at every hand on 



324 OLIVER CROMWELL 

the face of the angry sea. The Parhament in 1646 
had ordered the estabHshment of the Presbyterian sys- 
tem, but the country was indifferent or hostile ; classes, 
elderships, synods were in decay; even the standard 
confession of faith was still in essential articles uncon- 
firmed by law ; the fierce struggle over toleration was 
still indecisive and unsettled ; ecclesiastical confusion 
was complete. The Westminster divines, after long 
buffetings from the Erastian Parliament, and the tri- 
umphs of the hated Independents, had ceased to sit 
soon after the king's death. Presbyterian had become 
frankly a name for a party purely political. The state 
was as little settled as the church. For the formal 
machinery of government Cromwell cared little. What 
he sought, what had been deep in his mind amid all 
the toils of war, was the opening of a new way for 
righteousness and justice. Parliament, the State, the 
strength and ordering of a nation, to him were only 
means for making truth shine in the souls of men, and 
right and duty prevail in their life and act. "Disown 
yourselves," he exhorted the Parliament after the vic- 
tory at Dunbar, "but own your authority ; and improve 
it to curb the proud and insolent, such as would dis- 
turb the tranquillity of England, though under what 
specious pretenses soever. Relieve the oppressed, hear 
the groans of poor prisoners in England. Be pleased 
to reform the abuses of all professions ; and if there 
be any one that makes many poor to make a few rich, 
that suits not a Commonwealth." 

In the course of an interview that Cromwell sought 
with him, Ludlow hinted pretty plainly the suspicions 
that influenced this austere party. They had not liked 
the endeavor to come to terms with the king, and they 
were shocked by the execution of the mutineer at Ware. 
Cromwell owned dissatisfaction at the attempted treaty 



CIVIL PROBLEMS 325 

with the king to be reasonable, and excused the exe- 
cution done upon the soldier as absolutely necessary 
to prevent things from falling into confusion. He 
then said that the Lord was accomplishing what was 
prophesied in the iioth Psalm, and launched out for at 
least an hour, says Ludlow, with an audible moan, in 
the exposition of that Psalm. Finally he followed up 
his declaration of fidelity to a free and equal Common- 
wealth by describing how the substance of what he 
sought was a thorough reformation of the clergy and 
the law. And he traveled so far on the road with the 
Leveler and the Digger as to declare that "the law, as 
it is now constituted, serves only to maintain the law- 
yer, and to encourage the rich to oppress the poor." 
This was in truth the measure of Cromwell's ideals of 
social reform. x\lt.hough, however, law-reform and 
church-reform were the immediate ends of government 
in his eyes, the questions of Parliamentary or other 
machinery could not be evaded. Was the sitting frag- 
ment of a House of Commons fit to execute these re- 
forms, or fit to frame a scheme for a future constitu- 
tion? Was it to continue in permanence whole or 
partial? Cromwell's first step on his return was to 
persuade a majority to fix a date at which the Parlia- 
ment should come to an end, and when that was 
done we hear little more of him for many months. 
It was easy to see wdiat would follow. The date fixed 
for the expiry of the Parliament was three years off. 
The time was too long for effective concentration, and 
too short for the institution of a great scheme of com- 
prehensive reform. A provisional government work- 
ing within the limits of a fixed period, inevitably works 
at a heavy disadvantage. Everything is expected 
from it, yet its authority is impaired. Anxiety to 
secure the future blunts attention to the urs:encies of 



326 OLIVER CROMWELL 

the present. Men with a turn for corruption seek to 
make hay while the sun shines. Parties are shifting 
and unstable. The host of men who are restless with- 
out knowing what it is that they want, are never so 
dangerous. A governing body in such a situation was 
certain to be unpopular. "I told them/' said Crom- 
well afterward, "for I knew it better than any one man 
in the Parliament could know it ; because of my manner 
of life which had led me everywhere up and down the 
nation, thereby giving me to see and know the temper 
and spirits of all men, and of the best of men — that 
the nation loathed their sitting." 

This was probably true enough; unfortunately the 
systems that were now one after another to take the 
place of the Parliament w^ere loathed just as bitterly. 
"It is not the manner of settling these constitutional 
things," he said, "or the manner of one set of men 
or another doing it ; there remains always the grand 
question after that ; the grand question lies in the ac- 
ceptance of it by those who are concerned to yield 
obedience to it and accept it." This essential truth of 
all sound government he had in the old days pro- 
claimed against the constitution-mongers of the camp, 
and this was the truth that brought to naught all the 
constructive schemes of the six years before him. For 
it became more and more apparent that the bulk of the 
nation was quite as little disposed to accept the rule of 
the army as the rule of the mutilated Parliament. 

In December (1651) Cromwell held one of the con- 
ferences, in which he had more faith than the event 
ever justified, between prominent men in Parliament 
and leading officers in the army. He propounded the 
two questions, whether a republic or a mixed monarchy 
would be best ; and if a monarchy, then who should be 
the king. The lawyers, St. John, Lenthall, White- 



CIVIL PROBLEMS 327 

locke, were of opinion that the laws of England were 
interwoven \A-ith monarchy. They were for naming a 
period within which one of Charles's sons might come 
into the Parliament. Desborough and Whalley could 
not see why this, as well as other nations, should not 
be governed in the way of a republic. That was the 
sentiment of the army. Cromwell thought that it 
would be difficult, and inclined to the belief that, if it 
could be done with safety and preservation of rights 
both as Englishmen and Christians, "a settlement with 
somewhat of monarchical power in it would be very 
effectual." 

A little later his reflections brought him to use words 
of deeper and more direct import. We need invoke 
neither craft nor ambition to explain the rise of the 
thought in Cromwell's mind that he was perhaps him- 
self called to take the place and burden of chief gover- 
nor. The providences of ten years had seemed to 
mark him as the instrument chosen of heaven for the 
doing of a great work. He brooded, as he told men, 
over the times and opportunities appointed to him by 
God to serve him in; and he felt that the blessings of 
God therein bore testimony to him. After Worcester, 
he hoped that he would be allowed to reap the fruits of 
his hard labors and hazards, the enjoyment, to wit, of 
peace and liberty, and the privileges of a Christian and 
a man. Slowly he learned, and was earnestly assured 
by others, that this could not be. The continuing un- 
settlement was a call to him that, like Joshua of old, he 
had still a portion of the Lord's work to do and must 
be foremost in its doing. 

Walking one November day (1652) in St. James's 
Park, he sought a conversation with Whitelocke, who, 
better than any of these about him, represented the solid 
prose of the national mind. Cromwell opened to hmi 



328 OLIVER CROMWELL 

the dangers with which their jars and animosities beset 
the cause. Whitelocke boldly told him that the peril 
sprang from the imperious temper of the army. 
Cromwell retorted that on the contrary it sprang rather 
from the members of Parliament, who irritated the 
army by their self-seeking and greediness, their spirit 
of faction, their delay in the public business, their de- 
sign for prolonging their own power, their meddling in 
private matters between party and party that ought to 
have been left to the law-courts. The lives of some of 
them were scandalous, he said. They were irrespon- 
sible and uncontrolled ; what was wanted was some 
authority high enough to check all these exorbitances. 
Without that nothing in human reason could prevent 
the ruin of the Commonwealth. To this invective, 
not devoid of substance but deeply colored by the sol- 
dier's impatience of a salutary slowness in human 
affairs, Whitelocke replied by pressing the constitu- 
tional difficulty of curbing the Parliamentary power 
from which they themselves derived their own author- 
ity. Cromwell broke m upon him with the startling 
exclamation — "What if a man should take upon him to 
be king?" The obstacles in the path were plain enough, 
and the lawyer set them before Cromwell without 
flinching. For a short time longer the lord-general 
said and did no more, but he and the army watched 
the Parliament with growing suspicion and ill will. 
A military revolution became every day more 
imminent. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE BREAKING OF THE LONG PARLIAMENT 

THE military revolution of 1653 is the next tall 
landmark after the execution of the king. It is\ 
/Almost a commonplace, that "we do not know what / 
I party means, if we suppose that its leader is its mas^ 
Vtej" ; and the real extent of Cromwell's power over the 
army is hard to measure. In the spring of 1647, '^vhen 
the first violent breach between army and Parlia- 
ment took place, the extremists swept him off his feet. 
Then he acquiesced in Pride's Purge, but he did not 
originate it. In the action that preceded the trial and 
despatching of the king, it seems to have been Harri- 
son who took the leading part. In 1653 Cromwell 
said : "Major-General Harrison is an honest man, and 
aims at good things ; yet from the impatience of his 
spirit, he will not wait the Lord's leisure, but hurries 
one into that which he and all honest men will have 
cause to repent." If we remember how hard it is to 
fathom decisive passages in the historyof our own time, 
we see how much of that which we would most gladly 
know in the distant past must ever remain a surmise. 
But the best opinion in respect of the revolution of 
April, 1653, seems to be that the Royalists were not 
wrong who wrote that Cromwell's authority in the 
army depended much on Harrison and Lambert and 
their fanatical factions; that he was forced to go with 

329 



330 OLIVER CROMWELL 

them in order to save himself; and that he was the 
member of the triumvirate who was most anxious to 
wait the Lord's leisure yet a while longer. 

The immediate plea for the act of violence that now 
followed is as obscure as any other of Cromwell's pro- 
ceedings. In the closing months of 1652 he once more 
procured occasions of conference between himself and 
his officers on the one hand, and members of Parlia- 
ment on the other. He besought the Parliament men 
by their own means to bring forth of their own accord 
the good things that had been promised and were so 
long expected — "so tender were we to preserve them 
in the reputation of the people." The list of "good 
things" demanded by the army in the autumn of 1652 
hardly supports the modern exaltation of the army as 
the seat of political sagacity. The payment of arrears, 
the suppression of vagabonds, the provision of work 
for the poor, w^ere objects easy to ask, but impossible 
to achieve. The request for a new election was the 
least sensible of all. 

When it was known that the army was again wait- 
ing on God and confessing its sinfulness, things were 
felt to look grave. Seeing the agitation, the Parlia- 
ment applied themselves in earnest to frame a scheme 
for a new representative body. The army believed 
that the scheme was a sham, and that the semblance of 
giving the people a real right of choice was only to 
fill up vacant seats by such persons as the House now 
in possession should approve. This was nothing less 
than to perpetuate themselves indefinitely. Cromwell 
and the officers had a scheme of their own ; that the 
Parliament should name a certain number of men of 
the right sort, and these nominees should build a con- 
stitution. The Parliament in other words was to ab- 
dicate after calling a constituent convention. On April 



BREAKING THE PARLIAMENT 331 

19th a meeting took place in Oliver's apartment at 
Whitehall with a score of the more important members 
of Parliament. There the plan of the officers and the 
rival plan of Vane and his friends were brought face to 
face. What the exact scheme of the Parliament was, 
we cannot accurately tell, and we are never likely to 
know. Cromwell's own descriptions of it are vague 
and unintelligible. The bill itself he carried away 
with him under his cloak when the evil day came, and 
no copy of it survived. It appears, however, that in 
Vane's belief the best device for a provisional govern- 
ment — and no other than a provisional government 
was then possible — was that the Remnant should con- 
tinue to sit, the men who fought the deadly battles at 
Westminster in 1647 ^^^^ 1648, the men who had 
founded the Commonwealth in 1649, ^^^^ ^"^^^"^ who had 
carried on its work with extraordinary energy and suc- 
cess for four years and more. These were to continue 
to sit as a nucleus for a full representative ; joining to 
themselves such new men from the constituencies as 
they thought not likely to betray the Cause. On the 
whole we may believe that this was perhaps the least 
unpromising way out of difficulties where nothing was 
very promising. It was to avoid the most fatal of all 
the errors of the French Constituent, which excluded 
all its members from office and from seats in the Legis- 
lative Assembly to wdiose inexperienced hands it was 
entrusting the government of France. To blame its 
authors for fettering the popular choice was absurd in 
Cromwell, whose own proposal instead of a legislature 
to be partially and periodically renewed (if*that was 
really what Vane meant), was now for a nominated 
council without any element of popular choice at all. 
The army, we should not forget, were even less pre- 
pared than the Parliament for anything like a free 



332 OLIVER CROMWELL 

and open general election. Both alike intended to re- 
serve Parliamentary representation exclusively to such 
as were(godly men and faithful to the interests of the 
Commonwealth.") An open general election would have 
been as hazardous and probably as disastrous now 
I as at any moment since the defeat of King Charles in 
) the field; and a real appeal to the country would only 
have meant ruin to the Good Cause. Neither Crom- 
well, nor Lambert, nor Harrison, nor any of them, 
\ dreamed that a Parliament to be chosen without restric- 
/tions would be a safe experiment. The only questions 
(/ were what the restrictions were to be; who was to im- 
l pose them ; who was to guard and supervise them.'N The 
Parliamentary Remnant regarded themselves as the 
fittest custodians, and it is hard to say that they were 
wrong. In judging these events of 1653 we must 
look forward to events three years later. Cromwell 
had a Parliament of his own in 1654; it consisted of 
four hundred and sixty members; almost his first step 
was to prevent more than a hundred of them from 
taking their seats. He may have been right ; but why 
was the Parliament wrong for acting on the same 
principle? He had another Parliament in 1656, and 
again he began by shutting out nearly a hundred of its 
elected members. When the army cried for a dissolu- 
tion, they had no ideas as to the Parliament that was 
to follow. At least this much is certain, that what- 
ever failure might have overtaken the plan of Vane 
and the Parliament, it could not have been more 
complete than the failure that overtook the plan of 
Cromwefl. 

Apart from the question of the constitution of Par- 
liament, and perhaps regarding that as secondary, 
Cromwell quarreled with what, rightly or wrongly, he 
describes as the ultimate ideal of Vane and his friends. 



BREAKING THE PARLIAMENT 333 

We should have had fine work, he said four years later 
— a Council of State and a Parliament of four hundred 
men executing arbitrary government, and continuing 
the existing usurpation of the duties of the law-courts 
by legislature and executive. Undoubtedly "a horrid 
degree of arbitrariness" was practised by the Rump, 
but some allowance was to be made for a government 
in revolution ; and if that plea be not good for the Par- 
liament, one knows not why it should be good for the 
no less "horrid arbitrariness" of the Protector. As for 
the general character of the constitution here said to be 
contemplated by the Remnant, it has been compared to 
the French Convention of 1793; but a less odious and 
a truer parallel would be with the Swiss Confederacy 
to-day. How'ever this may be, if dictatorship was in- 
dispensable, the dictatorship of an energetic Parlia- 
mentary oligarchy was at least as hopeful as that of an 
oligarchy of soldiers. When the soldiers had tried their 
hands and failed, it was to some such plan as this that, 
after years of turmoil and vicissitude, Milton turned. 
At worst it was no plan that either required or justified 
violent deposition by a file of trgopers. 

The conference in Cromwell's apartments at White- 
hall on April 19th was instantly followed by one of 
those violent outrages for which v^-e have to find a name 
in the dialect of continental revolution. It had been 
agreed that the discussion should be resumed the next 
day, and meanwhile that nothing should be done with 
the bill in Parliament. When the next morning came, 
news was brought to Whitehall that the members had 
already assembled, were pushing the bill through at 
full speed, and that it was on the point of becoming 
law forthwith. At first Cromwell and the officers could 
not believe that Vane and his friends were capable of 
such a breach of their word. Soon there came a 



334 OLIVER CROMWELL 

second messenger and a third, with assurance that the 
tidings were true, and that not a moment was to be 
lost if the bill was to be prevented from passing. It is 
perfectly possible that there was no breach of word at 
all. The Parliamentary probabilities are that the news 
of the conference excited the jealousy of the private 
members, as arrangements between front benches are 
at all times apt to do, that they took the business into 
their own hands, and that the leaders were powerless. 
In astonishment and. anger Cromwell, in no more cere- 
monial apparel than his plain black clothes and grey 
worsted stockings, hastened to the House of Commons. 
He ordered a guard of soldiers to go with him. That 
he rose that morning with the intention of following 
the counsels that the impatience of the army had long 
prompted, and finally completing the series of exclu- 
sions, mutilations, and purges by breaking up the Par- 
liament altogether, there is no reason to believe. Long 
premeditation was never Cromwell's way. He w^aited 
for the indwelling voice, and more than once, in the 
rough tempests of his life, that demoniac voice was a 
blast of coarse and uncontrolled fury. Hence came 
one of the most memorable scenes of English history. 
There is a certain discord as to details among our too 
scanty authorities — some even describing the fatal 
transaction as passing with much modesty and as 
little noise as can be imagined. The description de- 
rived by Ludlow who was not present, from Harrison 
who was, gathers up all that seems material. There 
appear to have been between fifty and sixty members 
present. 

Cromwell sat down and heard the debate for some time. 
Then, calling to Major-General Harrison, who was on the 
other side of the House, to come to him, he told him that he 



BREAKING THE PARLIAMENT 335 

judged the Parliament ripe for a dissolution and this to be the 
time for doing it. The major-general answered, as he since 
told me, "Sir, the work is very great and dangerous: there- 
fore I desire you seriously to consider of it before you engage 
in it." " You say 7f'<?//," replied the general, and thereupon 
sat still for about a quarter of an hour. Then, the question 
for passing the bill being to be put, he said to Major-General 
Harrison — " This is the time : I must do it" and suddenly 
standing up, made a speech, wherein he loaded the Parlia- 
ment with the vilest reproaches, charging them not to have a 
heart to do anything for the public good, to have espoused 
the corrupt interest of presbytery and the lawyers, who were 
the supporters of tyranny and oppression — accusing them of 
an intention to perpetuate themselves in power; had they not 
been forced to the passing of this Act, which he affirmed they 
designed never to observe, and thereupon told them that the 
Lord has done with them, and had chosen other instruments 
for the carrying on his work that were more worthy. This he 
spoke with so much passion and discomposure of mind as if 
he had been distracted. Sir Peter Wentworth stood up to 
answer him, and said that this was the first time that ever he 
heard such unbecoming language given to the Parliament, 
and that it was the more horrid in that it came from their ser- 
vant, and their servant whom they had so highly trusted and 
obliged. But, as he was going on, the general stepped into 
the midst of the House, where, continuing his distracted lan- 
guage, he said — '■'•Come, come : I will put an end to your prat- 
ing." Then, walking up and down the House like a mad- 
man, and kicking the ground with his feet, he cried out, " You 
are no Parliament ; I say you are no Parliament ; I itnll put 
an end to your sitting ; call them in, call them in." Where- 
upon the sergeant attending the Parliament opened the* doors; 
and Lieutenant- Colonel Wolseley, with two files of muske- 
teers, entered the House; which Sir Henry Vane observing 
from his place said aloud, " This is not honest ; yea, it is 
against morality and common honesty." Then Cromwell fell 



336 OLIVER CROMWELL 

a-railing at him, crying out with a loud voice — '■'■Oh, Sir Henry 
Vane, Sir Henry Vane, the Lord deliver me from Sir Henry 
Vane ! " Then, looking to one of the members, he said : 
" There sits a drunkard " . . . ; and, giving much reviling 
language to others, he commanded the mace to be taken 
away, saying, " What shall we do with this bauble ? There, 
take it away." He having brought all into this disorder, 
Major-General Harrison went to the Speaker as he sat in the 
chair, and told him that, seeing things were reduced to this 
pass, it would not be convenient for him to remain there. 
The Speaker answered that he would not come down unless 
he were forced. " Sir," said Harrison, " I will lend you my 
hand; and thereupon, putting his hand within his, the 
Speaker came down. Then Cromwell applied himself to the 
members of the House . . . and said to them : " // is you that 
have forced me to this, for I have sought the Lord night and 
day that He would rather slay me than put me on the doing of 
this work ! " [Then] Cromwell . . . ordered the House to be 
cleared of all the members . . . ; after which he went to the 
clerk, and snatching the Act of Dissolution, which was ready 
to pass, out of his hand, he put it under his cloak, and, having 
commanded the doors to be locked up, went away to 
Whitehall. 

The fierce work was consummated in the afternoon. 
Cromwell heard that the Council of State, the creation 
of the destroyed legislature, was sitting as usual. 
Thither he repaired with Lambert and Harrison by his 
side. He seems to have recovered composure. "If 
you are met here as private persons," Cromwell said, 
"you shall not be disturbed ; but if as a Council of 
State, 'this is no place for yoti; and since you cannot 
but know what was done at the House in the morning, 
so take notice that the Parliament is dissolved." 
Bradshaw, who was in the chair, was not cowed. He 
had not quailed before a more dread scene with 



BREAKING THE PARLIAMENT Z2>7 

Charles four years ago. "Sir," he repHed, "we have 
heard what you did at the House in the morning, and 
before many hours all England will hear it ; but, sir, 
you are mistaken to think that the Parliament is dis- 
solved ; for no power under heaven can dissolve them 
but themselves ; therefore take you notice of that." 

Whatever else is to be said, it is well to remember 
that to condemn the Rump is to go a long way to- 
ward condemning the revolution. To justify Crom- 
well's violence in breaking it up, is to go a long way 
toward justifying Hyde and even Strafford. If the 
Commons had really sunk into the condition described 
by Oliver in his passion, such ignominy showed that 
the classes represented b}^ it were really incompetent, 
as men like Strafford had always deliberately believed, 
to take that supreme share in governing the country 
for which Pym and his generation of reformers had so 
manfully contended. For the Remnant was the quin- 
tessence left after a long series of elaborate distilla- 
tions. They w^ere not Presbyterians, moderates, re- 
spectables, bourgeois, pedants, Girondins. They, or 
the great majority of them, were the men wdio had re- 
sisted a continuance of the negotiations at Newport. 
They had made themselves accomplices in Pride's 
Purge. They had ordered the trial of the king. They 
had set up the Commonwealth without lords or mon- 
arch. They were deep in all the proceedings of Crom- 
wellian Thorough. They were the very cream after 
purification upon purification. If they could not gov- 
ern who could ? 

We have seen the harsh complaints of Cromwell 
against the Parliament in 1652, how selfish its members 
were, how ready to break into factions, how slow in 
business, how scandalous the lives of some of them. 
Yet this seems little better than the impatient indict- 



338 OLIVER CROMWELL 

ment of the soldier, if we remember how only a few 
months before the French agent had told Mazarin of 
the new rulers of the Commonwealth : "Not only were 
they powerful by sea and land, but they live without 
ostentation. . . . They were economical in their 
private expenses, and prodigal in their devotion to pub- 
lic affairs, for which each one toils as if for his personal 
interests. They handle large sums of money, which 
they administer honestly." We cannot suppose that 
two years had transformed such men into the guilty ob- 
jects of Cromwell's censorious attack. Cromwell ad- 
mitted, after he had violently broken them up, that there 
were persons of honor and integrity among them, who 
had eminently appeared for God and for the public 
good both before and throughout the war. It would in 
truth have been ludicrous to say otherwise of a body 
that contained patriots so unblemished in fidelity, en- 
ergy, and capacity as Vane, Scot, Bradshaw, and 
others. Nor is there any good reason to believe that 
these men of honor and integrity were a hopeless 
minority. We need not indeed suppose that the Rump 
was without time-servers. Perhaps no deliberative as- 
sembly in the world ever is without them, for time- 
serving has its roots in human nature. The question is 
what proportion the time-servers bore to the whole. 
There is no sign that it was large. But whether large 
or small, to deal with time-servers is part, and no in- 
considerable part, of the statesman's business, and it 
is hard to see how with this poor breed Oliver could 
have dealt worse. 

Again, in breaking up the Parliament he committed 
what in modern politics is counted the inexpiable sin 
of breaking up his party. This was the gravest of all. 
This was what made the revolution of 1653 a turning- 
point. The Presbyterians hated him as the great- 



BREAKING THE PARLIAMENT 339 

est of Independents. He had already set a deep gulf 
between himself and the Royalists of every shade by 
killing the king. To the enmity of the legitimists of 
a dynasty was now added the enmity of the legitimists 
of Parliament. By destroying the Parliamentary 
Remnant he set a new gulf between himself and most 
of the best men on his own side. Where was the 
policy? What foundations had he left himself to build 
upon? What was his calculation, or had he no calcu- 
lation, of forces, circumstances, individuals, for the 
step that was to come next? When he stamped in 
wrath out of the desecrated House had he ever firmly 
counted the cost? Or was he in truth as improvident 
as King Charles had been wdien he, too, marched down 
the same floor eleven years ago? In one sense his 
own creed erected improvidence into a principle. "Own 
your call," he says to the first of his own Parliaments, 
"for it is marvelous, and it hath been unprojected. It 's 
not long since either you or we came to know of it. 
And indeed this hath been the way God dealt with us 
all along. To keep things from our own eyes all 
along, so that we have seen nothing in all his dispen- 
sations long beforehand." And there is the famous 
saying of his, that "he goes furthest who knows not 
where he is going" — of which Retz said that it 
showed Cromwell to be a simpleton. We may at least 
admit the peril of a helmsman who does not forecast 
his course.- 

It is true that the situation was a revolutionary one, 
and the Remnant was no more a legal Parliament than 
Cromwell was legal monarch. The constitution had 
long vanished from the stage. From the day in May, 
1641. when the king had assented to the bill making a 
dissolution depend on the will of Parliament, down to 
the days in March, 1649, when the mutilated Commons 



340 OLIVER CROMWELL 

abolished the House of Lords and the office of a king, 
story after story of the constitutional fabric had come 
crashing- to the ground. The Rump alone was left to 
stand for the old tradition of Parliament and it was 
still clothed, even in the minds of those who were most 
querulous about its present failure of performance, 
with a host of venerated associations — the same asso- 
ciations that had lifted up men's hearts all through the 
fierce tumults of civil war. The rude destruction of 
the Parliament gave men a shock that awakened in 
some of them angry distrust of Cromwell, in others a 
broad resentment at the overthrow of the noblest of ex- 
periments, and in the largest class of all, deep misgiv- 
ings as to the past, silent self-questioning whether the 
whole movement since 1641 had not been a grave and 
terrible mistake. 

Guizot truly says of Cromwell that he was one of 
the men who know that even the best course in political 
action always has its drawbacks, and who accept, with- 
out flinching, the difficulties that might be laid upon 
them by their own decisions. This time, however, the 
day was not long in coming when Oliver saw reason 
to look back with regret upon those whom he now 
handled with such impetuous severity. When he 
quarreled with the first Parliament of his protectorate, 
less than two years hence, he used his old foes, if foes 
they were, for a topic of reproach against his new ones. 
*'I will say this on behalf of the Long Parliament, 
that had such an expedient as this government [the 
Instrument] been proposed to them ; and could they 
have seen the cause of God provided for ; and been by 
debates enlightened in the grounds of it, whereby the 
difficulties might have been cleared to them, and the 
reason of the whole enforced, and the circumstances of 
time and persons, with the temper and disposition of 



BREAKING THE PARLIAMENT 341 

the people, and affairs both abroad and at home might 
have been well weighed, I think in my conscience — 
well as they were thought to love their seats — they 
would have proceeded in another manner than you have 
done." To cut off in a fit of passion the chance of 
such a thing was a false step that he was never able 
to retrieve. 



CHAPTER VII 



THE REIGN OF THE SAINTS 

CROMWELL was now the one authority left stand- 
ing. "By Act of ParHament," he said, 'T was 
general of all the forces in the three nations of Eng- 
land, Scotland, and Ireland ; the authority I had in my 
hand being so boundless as it was." This unlimited 
condition both displeased his judgment and pricked his 
conscience; he protested that he did not desire to live 
in it for a single day ; and his protest was sincere. Yet 
in fact few were the days during the five years and a 
half from the breaking of the Parliament to his death, 
when the green withes of a constitution could bind the 
arms of this heroic Samson. We have seen how, in the 
distant times when Charles I was prisoner at Caris- 
brooke, Cromwell, not without a visible qualm, had 
brought to bear upon the scruples of Robert Hammond 
the doctrine of the People's Safety being the Supreme 
Law. Alas, Salus Populi is the daily bread of revolu- 
tions. It was the foundation, and the only founda- 
tion, of the Cromwellian dictatorship in all its chang- 
ing phases. 

After the rude dispersion of the Long Parliament 
next came the Reign of the Saints. No experiment 
could have worked worse. Here is Cromwell's rueful 
admission. "Truly I will now come and tell you a 
story of my own weakness and folly. And yet it was 

342 



THE REIGN OF THE SAINTS 343 

done in my simplicity, I dare avow it. It was thought 
then that men of our judgment, who had fought in 
the wars and were all of a piece upon that account, 
surely these men will hit it, and these men will do it to 
the purpose, whatever can be desired. And truly we 
did think, and I did think so, the more blame to me. 
And such a company of men were chosen, and did pro- 
ceed to action. And this was the naked truth, that the 
issue was not answerable to the simplicity and honesty 
of the design." Such was Oliver's own tale related 
four years afterward. The discovery that the vast 
and complex task of human government needs more 
than spiritual enthusiasm, that to have "very scriptural 
notions" is not enough for the reform of stubborn 
earthly things, marks yet another stage in Cromwell's 
progress. He was no idealist turned cynic — that 
mournful spectacle — but a warrior called by heaven, as 
he believed, to save civil order and religious freedom, 
and it was with this duty heavy on his soul that he 
watched the working of the scheme that Han ison had 
vehemently pressed upon him. As Ranke puts it, 
Cromwell viewed his own ideals, not from the point of 
subjective satisfaction, but of objective necessity; and 
this is one of the marks of the statesman. In the same 
philosophic diction, while the fighting men of a polit- 
ical party may be wrapped up in the absolute, the 
practical leader is bound fast by the relative. 

The company of men so chosen constituted what 
stands in history as the Little Parliament, or parodied 
from the name of one of its members, Barebones' Par- 
liament. They were nominated by Cromwell and his 
council of officers at their own will and pleasure, helped 
by the local knowledge of the Congregational churches 
in the country. The writ of summons, reciting how 
it was necessary to provide for the peace, safety, and 



344 OLIVER CROMWELL 

g-ood government of the Commonwealth, by commit- 
ting the trust of such weighty affairs to men with good 
assurance of love and courage for the interest of God's 
cause, was issued in the name of Oliver Cromwell, cap- 
tain-general and commander-in-chief. One hundred 
and thirty-nine of these summonses went out, and pres- 
ently five other persons were invited by the convention 
itself to join, including Cromwell, Lambert, and Har- 
rison. 

One most remarkable feature was the appearance for 
the first time of five men to speak for Scotland and six 
men for Ireland. This was the earliest formal fore- 
shadowing of legislative union. Of the six represen- 
tatives of Ireland, four were English officers, including 
Henry Cromwell; and the other two were English by 
descent. However devoid of any true representative 
quality in a popular sense, and however transient the 
plan, yet the presence of delegates sitting in the name 
of the two outlying kingdoms in an English govern- 
ing assembly, was symbolical of that great consolidat- 
ing change in the English State wdiich the political 
instinct of the men of the Commonwealth had de- 
manded, and the sword of Cromwell had brought 
within reach. The policy of incorporation originated in 
the Long Parliament. With profound wisdom they 
had based their Scottish schemes upon the emancipa- 
tion of the common people and small tenants from the 
oppression of their lords ; and Vane, St. John, Lambert, 
Monk, and others had to put the plan into shape. It 
was the curse of Ireland that no such emancipation was 
tried there. In Scotland the policy encountered two 
of the most powerful forces that affect a civilized so- 
ciety, a stubborn sentiment of nationality, and the bit- 
ter antagonism of the church. The sword, however, 
beat down military resistance, and it was left for the 



THE REIGN OF THE SAINTS 345 

Instrument of Government in 1653 to adopt the policy 
which the men of the Commonwealth had bequeathed 
to it. 

Though so irregular in their source, the nominees of 
the officers were undoubtedly for the most part men of 
worth, substance, and standing. Inspired throughout 
its course by the enthusiastic Harrison, the conven- 
tion is the high-water mark of the biblical politics of 
the time, of Puritanism applying itself to legislation 
political construction, and social regeneration. It 
hardly deserves to be described as the greatest attempt 
ever made in history to found a civil society on the 
literal words of Scripture, but it was certainly the 
greatest failure of such an attempt. To the Council 
Chamber at Whitehall the chosen notables repaired on 
the fourth of July (1653), a day destined a century 
and more later to be the date of higher things in the 
annals of free government. They seated themselves 
round the table, and the lord-general stood by the win- 
dow near the middle of it. The room was crowded 
with officers. Cromwell in his speech made no attempt 
to hide the military character of the revolution that 
had brought them together. The indenture, he told 
them, by which they were constituted the supreme au- 
thority, had been drawn up by the advice of the prin- 
cipal officers of the army; it was himself and his fellow 
officers who had vainly tried to stir up the Parliament ; 
he had been their mouthpiece to offer their sense for 
them ; it was the army to w'hom the people had looked, 
in their dissatisfaction at the breakdow^n of Parlia- 
mentary performance. Yet the very thinking of an 
act of violence was to them worse, he declared, than 
any battle that ever they were in, or that could be, to 
the utmost hazard of their lives. They felt how bind- 
ing it was upon them not to grasp at power for them- 



346 OLIVER CROMWELL 

selves, but to divest the sword of all power in the civil 
administration. So now' God had called this new su- 
preme authority to do his work, which had come to 
them by wise Providence through weak hands. Such 
was his opening story. That Cromwell was deeply 
sincere in this intention of divesting the army of 
supremacy in civil affairs, and of becoming himself 
their servant, there are few who doubt. But we only 
vindicate his sincerity at the cost of his sagacity. The 
destruction of the old Parliament that had at least 
some spark of legislative authority; the alienation of 
almost all the stanchest and ablest partizans of the 
scheme of a Commonwealth ; the desperate improba- 
bility of attracting any large body of members by the 
rule of the Saints, all left the new order without moral 
or social foundation, and the power of the sword the 
only rampart standing. 

Meanwhile, Oliver freely surrendered himself to the 
spiritual raptures of the hour. "I confess I never 
looked to see such a day as this, when Jesus Christ 
should be so owned as he is this day in this work. 
God manifests this to be the day of the Power of Christ, 
having through so much blood, and so much trial as 
hath been upon these nations, made this to be one of 
the great issues thereof; to have his people called to 
the supreme authority." Text upon text is quoted in 
lyric excitement from prophets, psalmists, and apostles, 
Old Testament dispensation, and New ; appeals to the 
examples of Moses and of Paul, wdio could wish them- 
selves blotted out of God's book for the sake of the 
whole people ; the verses from James ;J30ut wisdom 
from above being pure and peaceable, 'gentle and easy 
to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits ; and then 
at last the sixty-eighth Psalm with its triumphs so ex- 
ceeding high and great. 



THE REIGN OF THE SAINTS 347 

So far as the speech can be said to have any single 
practical note, it is that of Tolerance. "We should be 
pitiful . . . that we may have a respect unto all, 
and be pitiful and tender toward all though of differ- 
ent judgments. . . . Love all, tender all, cherish 
and countenance all, in all things that are good. And 
if the poorest Christian, the most mistaken Christian, 
shall desire to live peaceably and quietly under you — I 
say, if any shall desire but to lead a life of godliness 
and honesty, let him be protected." Toleration was 
now in Cromwell neither a conclusion drawn out by 
logical reason, nor a mere dictate of political expedi- 
ency. It flowed from a rich fountain in his heart of 
sympathy with men, of kindness for their sore strug- 
gles after saving truth, of compassion for their blind 
stumbles and mistaken paths. 

A few weeks began the dissipation of the dream. 
They were all sincere and zealous, but the most zealous 
were the worst simpletons. The soldier's jealousy of 
civil power, of which Cromwell had made himself the 
instrument on the twentieth of April, was a malady 
without a cure. The impatience that had grown so 
bitter against the old Parliament, soon revived against 
the new convention. It was the most unreasonable 
because the convention represented the temper and 
ideas of the army, such as they were, and the failure 
of the convention marks the essential sterility of the 
army viewed as a constructive party. Just as it is the 
nature of courts of law to amplify the jurisdiction, so 
it is the well-known nature of every political assembly 
to extend its powers. The moderate or conservative 
element seems to have had a small majority in the 
usual balance of parties, but the forward men made 
up for inferiority in numbers by warmth and assiduity. 
The fervor of the forward section in the Parliament 



348 OLIVER CROMWELL 

was stimulated by fanaticism out of doors : by cries 
that their gold had become dim, the ways of Zion filled 
with mourning and a dry wind, but neither to fan nor 
to cleanse upon the land : above all by the assurances 
of the preachers, that the four monarchies of Nebu- 
chadnezzar and Cyrus, of Alexander and Rome, had 
each of them passed away, and that the day had come 
for the fifth and final monarchy, the Kingdom of Jesus 
Christ upon the earth : and this, no mere reign set up 
in men's hearts, but a scheme for governing nations 
and giving laws for settling liberty, property, and the 
foundations of a commonwealth. 

The fidelity of the convention to Cromwell was 
shown by the unanimous vote that placed him on the 
Council of State; but the great dictator kept himself 
in the background, and in good faith hoping against 
hope he let things take their course. "I am more 
troubled now," said he, "with the fool than with the 
knave." The new men at once and without leave 
took to themselves the name of Parliament. Instead 
of carrying on their special business of a constituent 
assembly, they set to work with a will at legislation, 
and legislation moreover in the high temper of root 
and branch, for cursed is he that doeth the work of the 
Lord negligently. A bill was run throvigh all its 
stages in a single sitting, for the erection of a high 
court of justice in cases where a jury could not be 
trusted to convict. Ominous language was freely 
used upon taxation, and it was evident that the sacred 
obligations of supply and the pay of the soldiers and 
sailors were in peril. They passed a law requiring that 
all good marriages must take place before a justice of 
the peace, after due publication of banns in some open 
resort sacred or secular. Of the projects of law re- 
form inherited from the Long Parliament they made 



THE REIGN OF THE SAINTS 349 

nonsense. Before they had been a month in session, 
they passed a resolution that the Court of Chancery 
should be wholly taken away and abolished ; and after 
three bills had been brought in and dropped for carry- 
ing this resolution into act, they read a second time a 
fourth bill for summarily deciding cases then pending, 
and arranging that for the future the ordinary suits in 
chancery should be promptly despatched at a cost of 
from twenty to forty shillings. They set a committee, 
without a lawyer upon it, to work on the reduction of 
the formless mass of laws, cases, and precedents, to a 
code that should be of no greater bigness than a pocket- 
book. The power of patrons to present to livings was 
taken away, though patronage was as truly property as 
land. More vital aspects of the church question fol- 
lowed. A committee reported in favor of the appoint- 
ment of a body of State Commissioners with power to 
eject unfit ministers and fill vacant livings ; and what 
was a more burning issue, in favor of the maintenance 
of tithe as of legal obligation. By a majority of two 
(fifty-six against fifty-four) the House disagreed with 
the report, and so indicated their intention to abolish 
tithe and the endowment of ministers of religion by 
the State. This led to the crisis. The effect of pro- 
ceedings so singularly ill devised for the settlement of 
the nation v/as to irritate and alarm all the nation's 
most powerful elements. The army, the lawyers, the 
clergy, the holders of property, all felt themselves at- 
tacked; and the lord-general himself perceived, in his 
own words afterward, that the issue of this assembly 
would have been the subversion of the laws, and of all 
the liberties of their nation, the destruction of the min- 
isters of the gospel, in short the confusion of all things ; 
and instead of order, to set up the judicial law of 
Moses, in abrogation of all our administrations. The 



350 OLIVER CROMWELL 

design that shone so radiantly five months before had 
sunk away in clouds and vain chimera. Nor had the 
reign of chimera even brought popularity. Lilburne, 
the foe of all government, whether it was inspired by 
folly or by common-sense, appeared once more upon the 
scene, and he was put upon his trial before a court of 
law for offenses of which he had been pronounced 
guilty by the Long Parliament. The jury found him 
innocent of any crime worthy of death, and the verdict 
was received with shouts of joy by the populace. This 
was to demonstrate that the government of the Saints 
was at least as odious as the government of the dis- 
possessed Remnant. 

The narrow division on the abolition of tithe con- 
vinced everybody that the ship was water-logged. 
Sunday, December nth, was passed in the concoction 
of devices of bringing the life of the notables to an end. 
On Monday the Speaker took the chair at an early 
hour, and a motion was promptly made that the sitting 
of the Parliament was no longer for the public good 
and therefore that they should deliver up to the lord- 
general the powers they had received from him. An 
attempt to debate was made, but as no time was to be 
lost, in case of members arriving in numbers sufficient 
to carry a hostile motion, the Speaker rose from his 
chair, told the sergeant to shoulder the mace, and fol- 
lowed by some forty members who were in the secret 
set forth in solemn procession to Whitehall. A minor- 
ity kept their seats, until a couple of colonels with a file 
of soldiers came to turn them out. According to a 
Royalist story, one of the colonels asked them what 
they were doing. "We are seeking the Lord," was the 
answer. "Then you should go elsewhere," the colonel 
replied, "for to my knowledge the Lord has not been 
here these twelve years past." We have Cromwell's 



THE REIGN OF THE SAINTS 351 

words that he knew nothing of this intention to re- 
sign. If so, the dismissal of the fragment of the mem- 
bers by a handful of troopers on their own author- 
ity is strange, and shows the extraordinary pitch that 
military manners had reached. Oliver received the 
Speaker and his retinue with genuine or feigned sur- 
prise, but accepted the burden of power that the ab- 
dication of the Parliament had once more laid upon 
him. 

These proceedings were an open breach with the 
Saints, but, as has been justly said ( Weingarten), this 
circumstance involves no more contradiction between 
the Cromwell of the past and the Protector, than there 
is contradiction between the Luther who issued in 1520 
his flaming manifesto to the Christian nobles of the 
German nation, and the Luther that two years later 
confronted the misguided men who supposed them- 
selves to be carrying out doctrines that they had learned 
from him. Puritanism, like the Reformation gener- 
ally, was one of those revolts against the leaden 
yoke of convention, ordinance, institution, in which, 
whether in individuals or in a tidal mass of men, the 
human soul soars passionately forth toward new hori- 
zons of life and hope. Then the case for convention 
returns, the need for institution comes back, the 
nature of things will not be hurried nor defied. Re- 
actions followed the execution of the king. Painfully 
Milton now, five years later, bewailed the fact that the 
people with "besotted and degenerate baseness of spirit, 
except some few who yet retain in them the old Eng- 
lish fortitude and love of freedom, imbastardized from 
the ancient nobleness of their ancestors, are ready to 
fall flat and give adoration to the image and memory 
of this man." These were the two strong floods be- 
tween which, in their ebb and flow, Cromwell found 



352 OLIVER CROMWELL 

himself caught. His practical eye discerned it all, and 
what had happened. Yet this was perhaps the moment 
when Cromwell first felt those misgivings of a devout 
conscience that inspired the question put by him on 
his death-bed, whether it was certain that a man once in 
grace must be always in grace. 



BOOK FIVE 



23 



IBook five 

CHAPTER I 



FIRST STAGE OF THE PROTECTORATE 



"IT THAT are all our histories, cried Cromwell in 
VV 1655, what are all our traditions of actions in 
former times, but God manifesting himself, that hath 
shaken and tumbled down and trampled upon every- 
thing that he had not planted. It was not long after 
that Bossuet began to work out the same conception 
in the glowing literary form of the discourse on uni- 
versal history. What was in Bossuet the theme of a 
divine, was in Cromwell the life-breath of act, toil, 
hope, submission. For him the drama of time is no 
stage-play, but an inspired and foreordained dispen- 
sation ever unfolding itself "under a waking and all- 
searching Eye," and in this high epic England had the 
hero's part. 'T look at the people of these nations 
as the blessing of the Lord," he said, "and they are a 
people blessed by God. . . . If I had but a hope 
fixed in me that this cause and this business was of 
God, I would many years ago have run from it. . . . 
But if the Lord take pleasure in England, and if he 
will of us good, he is very able to bear us up. . . ." 
As England was the home of the Chosen People, so 
also he read in all the providences of battle-fields, from 

355 



356 OLIVER CROMWELL 

Winceby to Worcester, that he was called to be the 
Moses or the Joshua of the new deliverance. 

Milton's fervid Latin appeal of this date did but roll 
forth in language of his own incomparable splendor, 
though in phrases savoring more of Pericles or Roman 
stoic than of the Hebrew sacred books, the thoughts 
that lived in Cromwell. Milton had been made sec- 
retary of the first Council of State almost immediately 
after the execution of the king in 1649, '^"^^ ^^^ ^^^^ 
employed in the same or similar duties until the end of 
Cromwell and after. Historic imagination vainly 
seeks to picture the personal relations between these 
two master-spirits, but no trace remains. They must 
sometimes have been in the council chamber together ; 
but whether they ever interchanged a w^ord we do not 
know. When asked for a letter of introduction for a 
friend to the English Ambassador in Holland (1657), 
Milton excused himself, saying, "I have very little ac- 
quaintance with those in power, inasmuch as I keep 
very much to my own house, and prefer to do so." A 
painter's fancy has depicted Oliver dictating to the 
Latin secretary the famous despatches on the slaugh- 
tered Saints whose bones lay scattered on the Alpine 
mountains cold ; but by then the poet had lost his sight, 
and himself probably dictated the English drafts from 
Thurloe's instructions, and then turned them into his 
own sonorous Latin. He evidently approved the 
supersession of the Parliament, though we should re- 
member that he includes in all the breadth of his pane- 
gyric both Bradshaw and Overton, who as strongly dis- 
approved. He bids the new Protector to recall the 
aspect and the wounds of that host of valorous men 
who with him for a leader had fought so strenuous a 
fight for freedom, and to revere their shades. Further 
he adjures him to revere himself, that thus the free- 















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From the original miniature by Samuel Cooper at INIontagu House, 
by permission of the Duke of Buccleuch. 

JOHN MILTON. 



THE PROTECTORATE'S FIRST STAGE 357 

dom for which he had faced countless perils and borne 
such heavy cares, he would never suffer to be either 
violated by hand of his or impaired by any other. 
"Thou canst not be free if we are not; for it is the law 
of nature that he who takes away the liberty of others 
is by that act the first himself to lose his own. A 
mighty task hast thou undertaken ; it will probe thee to 
the core, it will show thee as thou art, thy carriage, thy 
force, thy weight; whether there be truly alive in thee 
that piety, fidelity, justice, and moderation of spirit, 
for which we believe that God hath exalted thee above 
thy fellows. To guide three mighty states by counsel, 
to conduct them from institutions of error to a wor- 
thier discipline, to extend a provident care to furtherest 
shores, to watch, to foresee, to shrink from no toil, to 
flee all the empty shows of opulence and power — these 
indeed are things so arduous that, compared with them, 
war is but as the play of children." 

Such is the heroic strain in which the man of high 
aerial visions hailed the man with strength of heart 
and arm and power of station. This Miltonian glory 
of words marks the high-tide of the advance from the 
homely sages of 1640 to the grand though transient 
recasting of the fundamental conceptions of national 
consciousness and life. The apostle and the soldier 
were indeed two men of different type, and drew their 
inspiration from very different fountains, but we may 
well believe Aubrey when he says that there were those 
who came over to England only to see Oliver Pro- 
tector and John Milton. 

II 

Four days sufficed to erect a new government. The 
scheme was prepared by the officers with Lambert at 



358 OLIVER CRO^IWELL 

their head. Cromwell fell in with it, hearing little 
about formal constitutions either way. On the after- 
noon of December i6th, 1653. a procession set out 
from Whitehall for \\''estminster Hall. The judges 
in their robes, the high officers of government, the Lord 
Mayor and the magnates of the city, made their way 
amid two lines of soldiers to the Chancery Court 
where a chair of state had been placed upon a rich 
carpet. Oliver, clad in a suit and cloak of black velvet, 
and with a gold band upon his hat, was invited by 
Lambert to take upon himself the office of Lord Pro- 
tector of the Commonwealth of England. Scotland, 
and Ireland, conformably to the terms of an Instru- 
ment of Government which was then read. The lord- 
general assented, and forthwith took and subscribed 
the solemn oath of fidelity to the matters and things 
set out in the Instrument. Then, covered, he sat down 
in the chair of state while those in attendance stood 
bareheaded about him. The commissioners cere- 
moniously handed to him the great seal, and the Lord 
Mayor proffered him his sword of office. The Pro- 
tector returned the seal and sword, and after he had 
received the grave obeisance of the dignitaries around 
him, the act of state ended and he returned to the palace 
of Whitehall, amid the acclamations of the soldiery 
and the half ironic curiosity of the crowd. He was 
proclaimed by sound of trumpet in Palace Yard, at the 
Old Exchange, and in other places in London, the 
Lord Alayor attending in his robes, the sergeants with 
their maces, and the heralds in their gold coats. 
Henceforth the Lord Protector "observed new and 
great state, and all ceremonies and respects were paid to 
him by all sorts of men as to their prince." The new 
constitution thus founding the Protectorate was the 
most serious of the expedients of that distracted time. 



THE PROTECTORATE'S FIRST STAGE 359 

The first stage of the Protectorate was in fact a 
near approach to a monarchical system very Hke that 
which Strafford would have set up for Charles, or 
which Bismarck two hundred years later set up for the 
King of Prussia. One difference is that Cromwell 
honestly strove to conceal from himself as from the 
world the purely military foundations of his power. 
His social ideal was wide as the poles from Strafford's, 
but events forced him round to the same political ideal. 
A more material difference is that the Protector had a 
powerful and victorious army behind him, and Straf- 
ford and his master had none. 

On the breakdown of the Barebones' Parliament 
the Sphinx once more propounded her riddle. How to 
reconcile executive power with popular supremacy, 
what should be the relations between executive and 
legislature, what the relations between the church and 
the magistrate ; these were the problems that divided 
the dead king and the dead Parliament, that had baffled 
Pym and Hyde, that had perplexed Ireton and the offi- 
cers, and now confronted Oliver. It was easy to 
affirm the sovereignty of the people as an abstract 
truth. But the machinery? We must count one of 
the curiosities of history the scene of this little group 
of soldiers sitting down to settle in a few hours the 
questions that to this day, after ages of constitution- 
mongering and infinitely diversified practice and ex- 
periment all over the civilized world, beset the path of 
self-governing peoples. No doubt they had material 
only too abundant. Scheme after scheme had been 
propounded, at Oxford, at Uxbridge, at Newcastle, at 
Newport. The army had drawn up its Heads of Pro- 
posals, and these were followed a few days before the 
king was brought to the scaffold by the written con- 
stitution known as the Agreement of the People. The 



36o OLIVER CROMWELL 

officers had well-trodden ground to go upon, and yet the 
journey was nearly as obscure as it had ever been. 

In face of the lord-general, as in face of the Lord's 
Anointed, the difficulty was the same, how to limit the 
power of the executive over taxation and an army, 
without removing all limits on the power of the repre- 
sentative legislature. Cromwell, undoubtedly in ear- 
nest as he was in desiring to restore Parliamentary 
government, and to set effective checks on the Single 
Person, nevertheless by temperament, by habit of mind 
engendered of twelve years of military command, and 
by his view of the requirements of the crisis, was the 
last man to work a Parliamentary Constitution. A 
limited dictator is an impossibility, and he might have 
known it, as Napoleon knew it. If Cromwell and his 
men could not work with the Rump, if they could not 
work with the Saints, the officers, as they rapidly ham- 
mered together the Instrument of Government, might 
have known that no ingenuity would make their brand- 
new carpentering water-tight. 

The Magna Charta that now installed Oliver as 
Lord Protector of the Commonwealth, and survived 
for over three years, though loose enough in more than 
one essential particular, was compact. The govern- 
ment was to be in a single person and a Parliament, 
but to these two organs of rule was added a Council of 
State. This was an imperfect analogue of the old 
privy council or of the modern cabinet. Its members 
were named in the Act and sat for life. The council 
had a voice, subject to confirmation by Parliament, in 
appointments to certain of the high offices. Each of the 
three powers was a check upon the other two. Then 
came the clauses of a reform bill, and Cromwell has 
been praised for anticipating Pitt's proposals for de- 
molishing rotten boroughs ; in fact, the reform bill was 



THE PROTECTORATE'S FIRST STAGE 361 

adopted bodily from the labors of Ireton, Vane, and 
the discarded Parliament. 

The Parliament, a single house, was to sit for at 
least five months in every three years. This got rid of 
Cromwell's bugbear of perpetuity. The Protector, if 
supported by a majority of his council, could summon a 
Parliament in an emergency, and in case of a future 
war with a foreign state he had no option. Scotland 
and Ireland were each to send thirty members, and no 
Irish Parliament was summoned until after the restor- 
ation. One sub-clause of most equivocal omen made 
a majority of the council into judges of the qualifica- 
tions and disqualifications of the members returned; 
and, as we shall see, this legislation of future mutila- 
tions of the legislature by the executive did not long 
remain a dead letter. Every bill passed by Parlia- 
ment was to be presented to the Protector for his con- 
sent, and if he did not within twenty days give his 
consent, then the bill became law without it. unless he 
could persuade them to let it drop. The normal size 
of the army and navy was fixed, and a fixed sum was 
set down for civil charges. The Protector and council 
were to decide on ways and means of raising the rev- 
enue required, and Parliament could neither lower 
the charges nor alter ways and means without the Pro- 
tector's consent. In case of extraordinary charge, as 
by reason of war, the consent of Parliament was 
needed; but if Parliament were not sitting, then the 
Protector with the majority of his council had power 
both to raise money and to make ordinances, until Par- 
liament should take order concerning them. This 
power of making provisional laws was not exercised 
after the assembling of the first Parliament. 

The two cardinal questions of control of the army 
and the settlement of religion were decided in a way 



362 OLIVER CROMWELL 

little dreamed of by Eliot or Coke, by Pym or Hamp- 
den. While Parliament was sitting, that is for five 
months out of three years, its approval was required 
for the disposal of forces by land and sea ; when Parlia- 
ment was not sitting, the Protector, with the assent of 
a majority of the council, could do as he pleased. The 
religious clauses are vague, but they are remarkable as 
laying down for the first time with authority a prin- 
ciple of Toleration. A public profession of the Chris- 
tian religion as contained in the Scriptures was to be 
recommended as the faith of these nations, and the 
teachers of it were to be confirmed in their subsistence. 
But adherence was not to be compulsory, and all 
Christians outside the national communion, save Pa- 
pists, Prelatists, and such as under the profession of 
Christ hold forth licentiousness, were to be protected 
in the exercise of their own creed. So far had re- 
formers traveled from the famous section of the Grand 
Remonstrance twelve years before, where the first stout 
forefathers of the Commonwealth had explicitly dis- 
avowed all purpose of letting loose the golden reins 
of discipline in church government, or leaving private 
persons to believe and worship as they pleased. The 
result reduced this declaration to little more than the 
plausible words of a pious opinion. The Indepen- 
dents, when they found a chance, were to show them- 
selves as vigorous and as narrow as other people. 

The Instrument of Government had a short life, and 
not an important one. It has a certain surviving in- 
terest, unlike the French constitutions of the Year III, 
the Year VIII, and other ephemera of the same species, 
because, along with its sequel of the Humble Petition 
and Advice (1657), it is the only attempt in English 
history to w'ork in this island a wholly written system, 
and because it has sometimes been taken to foreshadow 



THE PROTECTORATE'S FIRST STAGE 3^3 

the Constitution of the United States. The American 
analogy does not hold. The Cromwellian separation 
of executive from legislative power was but a fitful 
and confused attempt. Historically, there are no indi- 
cations that the framers of the American Constitution 
had the instrument in their minds, and there are, I be- 
lieve, no references to it either in the pages of the 
''Federalist" or in the recorded constitutional debates 
of the several States. Nor was it necessary for the 
American draftsman to go back to the Commonwealth ; 
their scheme was based upon State constitutions already 
subsisting, and it was in them that they found the 
principle of fundamentals, or constitutional guarantees 
not alterable like ordinary laws. Apart from historical 
connection the coincidences between the Instrument 
and the American Constitution are very slight, while 
the differences are marked. The Protector is to be 
chosen by the council, not by the people. He has no 
veto on legislation. His tenure is for life ; so is the 
tenure of the council. There is no direct appeal to 
the electorate as to any executive office. Parliament, 
unlike Congress, is to consist of one House. The two 
schemes agree in embodying the principle of a rigid 
constitution, but in the Instrument there are, according 
to Oliver himself, only four fundamentals, and all the 
rest is as liable to amendment or repeal, and in the 
same way, as any other statute. This is essentially 
different from the American system alike in detail and 
in principle. Make by act an American president master 
for life, with the assent of a small council of persons 
nominated for life, of the power of the sword, of the 
normal power of the purse, of the power of religious 
establishment, for thirty-one months out of thirty-six, 
and then you might have something like the Instru- 
ment of Government. The fatal passion for parallels 



364 OLIVER CROMWELL 

has led to a still more singular comparison. Within 
the compass of a couple of pages Mommsen likens the 
cynical and bloodthirsty Sulla to Don Juan because he 
was frivolous, to George Washington because he was 
unselfish, and to Oliver Cromwell because they both 
set up or restored order and a constitution. 



Ill 



In virtue of their legislative capacity Cromwell and 
his council passed more than eighty ordinances in the 
eight months between the establishment of the Pro- 
tectorate and the meeting of the Parliament. This is 
called Cromwell's great creative period, yet in truth the 
list is but a meager show of legislative fertility. Many 
of them were no more than directions for administra- 
tion. Some were regulations of public police. One 
of them limited the numbers of hackney coaches in 
London to two hundred. Duels and challenges were 
prohibited, and to kill an adversary in a duel was made 
a capital offense. Drunkenness and swearing were 
punished. Cock-fighting was suppressed, and so for 
a period was horse-racing. There were laws for rais- 
ing money upon the church lands, and laws for fixing 
excise. Among the earliest and most significant was 
the repeal of the memorable enactment of the first days 
of the republic, that required an engagement of alle- 
giance to the Commonwealth. This relaxation of the 
republican test was taken by the more ardent spirits as 
stamping the final overthrow of the system consecrated 
to freedom, and it still further embittered the enmity 
of those who through so many vicissitudes had in more 
hopeful days been Cromwell's closest allies. More 
far-reaching and fundamental were the edicts incor- 



THE PROTECTORATE'S FIRST STAGE 365 

porating Scotland and Ireland into one Commonwealth 
with England, but these were in conformity with the 
bill of the Long Parliament in 1652. From the Long 
Parliament also descended the policy of the edict for 
the settlement of the lands in Ireland. One of the 
cardinal subjects of the ordinances in this short period 
of reforming and organizing activity was the Court of 
Chancery. The sixty-seven clauses reforming chan- 
cery are elaborate, but they show no presiding mind. 
Imperious provisions, that every cause must be deter- 
mined on the day on which it is set down for hearing, 
savor more of the sergeant and his guard-room than 
of a law-court threading its way through mazes of dis- 
puted fact, conflicting testimony, old precedents, new 
circumstances, elastic principles, and ambiguous 
application. Lenthall, now Master of the Rolls, vowed 
that he would be hanged up at the gate of his own 
court rather than administer the ordinance. In revo- 
lutionary times men are apt to change their minds, and 
he thought better of it. Others were more constant. 
It is impossible to read Whitelocke's criticisms without 
perceiving that he and his brother commissioner of the 
great seal had good grounds for their refusal to exe- 
cute the ordinance. The judgment of modern legal 
critics, not unfriendly to Oliver, is that his attempt at 
chancery reform shows more zeal than discretion ; that 
it substituted hard and fast rules for the flexible sys- 
tem that was indispensable in equity; that it was 
spoiled by lack of moderation. 

Cromwell possessed far too much of the instinct for 
order and government — which is very narrowly de- 
scribed when it is called conservative — not to do his 
best to secure just administration of the law. Some of 
the most capable lawyers of the age were persuaded to 
serve in the office of judge, and there is no doubt that 



366 OLIVER CROMWELL 

they discharged with uprightness, good sense, and 
efficiency both their strictly judicial duties and the im- 
portant functions in respect of general county busi- 
ness which in those days fell upon the judges of assize. 
Slackness in this vital department would speedily have 
dissolved social order in a far deeper sense than any 
political step, even the execution of a king or the break- 
ing of a Parliament. But whenever what he chose to 
regard as reason of state affected him, Cromwell was 
just as ready to interfere with established tribunals 
and to set up tribunals specially to his purpose, as if he 
had been a Stuart or a Bourton. 

One of the strong impulses of the age was educa- 
tional. Cromwell was keenly alive to it, and both in 
the universities and elsewhere he strove to further it. 
Nothing survived the Restoration. Most important 
of all Cromwell's attempts at construction was the 
scheme for the propagation of religion, and it deserves 
attention. The dire controversy that split up the 
Patriot party in the first years of the Long Parliament, 
that wrecked the throne, that was at the bottom of the 
quarrels with the Scots, that inspired the fatal feud 
between Presbyterian and Independent, that occupied 
the last days of the Rump, and brought to naught the 
reign of the Saints, was still the question that went 
deepest in social life. The forefathers of the Com- 
monwealth had sought a state church with compulsory 
uniformity. The fervid soul of Milton, on the con- 
trary, was eager for complete disassociation of church 
from state, eager "to save free conscience from the paw 
of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw." So 
were the most advanced meti in the Parliament of Bare- 
bones. But voluntaryism and toleration of this un- 
compromising temper was assuredly not universal even 
among Independents. Cromwell had never committed 



THE PROTECTORATE'S FIRST STAGE 367 

himself to it. In adhesion to the general doctrine of 
liberty of conscience, he had never wavered. Perhaps 
it was the noblest element in his whole mental equip- 
ment. He valued dogmatic nicety as little in religion 
as he valued constitutional precision in politics. His 
was the cast of mind to which the spirit of system is in 
every aspect wholly alien. The presence of God in the 
hearts of men ; the growth of the perfect man within 
us ; the inward transformation, not by literal or specu- 
lative knowledge, but by participation in the divine, in 
things of the mind ; no compulsion but that of light and 
reason — such was ever his faith. I am not a man, he 
said, scrupulous about words or names or such things. 
This was the ver}^ temper for a comprehensive set- 
tlement, if only the nation had been ripe for compre- 
hension. Cromwell had served on two important Par- 
liamentary committees on propagation of the gospel 
after his return from Worcester. There on one occa- 
sion it pleased somebody on the committee zealously to 
argue against a Laodicean indifferency, professing that 
he would rather be a Saul than a Gallio. Then Crom- 
well made the vehement declaration that he would 
rather have Mohammedanism permitted, than that one 
of God's children should be persecuted. But the ques- 
tion of Toleration was one, and that of a state-paid 
ministry was another. Toleration, with the two stereo- 
typed exclusions of popery and prelacy, as we have 
seen, was definitely adopted, so far as words went, in 
two sections of the Instrument of Government, and so 
too was the principle of a public profession of religion 
to be maintained from public funds. An Episcopal 
critic was angry at the amazing fact that in the Magna 
Charta of the new constitution there was not a word of 
churches or ministers, nor anything else but the Chris- 
tian religion in general — as if the Christian religion in 



368 OLIVER CROMWELL 

general were but something meager and diminutive. 
The usual and inevitable controversy soon sprung into 
bitter life as to what were the fundamentals covered by 
this bland and benignant phrase, and the divines had 
not effectually settled their controversy when they were 
overtaken by the Restoration. What Cromwell's ordi- 
nance of 1654 did was, upon the principle of the In- 
strument, to frame a working system. In substance he 
adopted the scheme that Dr. John Owen, now dean of 
Christ Church, had submitted to the Parliament in 
1652, and which was in principle accepted by the Rump 
in its closing days. A story is told by Bishop Wilkins. 
who was the husband of Cromwell's youngest sister 
Robina, that the Protector often said to him that no 
temporal government could have a sure support with- 
out a national church that adhered to it, and that he 
thought England was capable of no constitution but 
Episcopacy. The second imputation must be apocry- 
phal, but Cromwell had undoubtedly by this time firmly 
embraced the maxim alike of King Charles and of the 
Long Parliament, that the care of religion is the busi- 
ness of the state. His ordinances institute a double 
scheme for expelling bad ministers, and testing the ad- 
mission of better. No man was henceforth to be 
capable of receiving a stipend who failed to satisfy of 
his character, conversation, and general fitness a com- 
mission of divines and laymen, some forty in number, 
divines being to laymen as three to one. By the side 
of this Commission of Triers was a smaller commis- 
sion of Ejectors, for the converse task of removing 
ignorant, negligent, or scandalous persons. The tithe 
was maintained and patronage was maintained, only 
security was taken for the fitness of the presentee. No 
theological tests were prescribed. No particular church 
organization was imposed, though Episcopacy like the 




From a miniature by J. Hoskip.s at Windsor Castle. 
By special permission of Her Majesty the Queen. 

RICHARD CROMWELL. 



THE PROTECTORATE'S FIRST STAGE 369 

Prayer-book was forbidden. Of the three sorts of 
godly men, said OHver, Presbyterians, Baptists, and 
Independents, so long as a man had the root of the 
matter in him, it does not concern his admission to a 
living to whatever of the three judgments he may be- 
long. The parishes were to adopt the Presbyterian 
or the Congregational form as they liked best. In 
practice, outside of London and Lancashire, where the 
Presbyterianism established by the Parliament in 1647 
had taken root, the established church during the Pro- 
tectorate was on the Congregational model, with so 
much of Presbyterianism about it as came from free 
association for discipline and other purposes. The 
important feature in Oliver's establishment was that a 
man who did not relish the service or the doctrine or 
the parson provided for him by public authority at his 
parish church, was free to seek truth and edification 
after his own fashion elsewhere. This wise liberality, 
which wins Oliver so many friends to-day, in those 
times bitterly offended by establishment the host of 
settled voluntaries, and offended the greater host of 
rigorous Presbyterians by Toleration. It may well 
have been that he determined to set up his system of 
church government by the summary way of ordinance 
before Parliament met, because he knew that no Par- 
liament even partially representative would pass it. 

We owe the best picture of the various moods of 
the pulpit men at this interesting moment to the pro- 
foundest theologian of them all. Baxter recognized, 
like other people, that the victorious revolutionary sol- 
dier was now endeavoring to dam within safe banks 
the torrent that the Revolution had set running. Now, 
he says, Cromwell exclaims against the giddiness of 
the unruly extremists ; and earnestly pleads for order 
and government. This putting about of the ship's 

24 



370 OLIVER CROMWELL 

helm affected men's minds in different ways. Some 
declared that they would rather see both tithes and uni- 
versities thrown overboard than submit to a treacher- 
ous usurpation. Others said that it was Providence 
that had brought the odious necessity about, whoever 
might be its instrument ; and necessity required them 
to accept the rule of any one who could deliver them 
from anarchy. Most ministers took a middle way, 
and it was Baxter's own way : "I did in open confer- 
ence declare Cromwell and his adherents to be guilty 
of treason and rebellion, aggravated by perfidiousness 
and hypocrisy, but yet I did not think it my duty to 
rave against him in the pulpit ; and the rather because, 
as he kept up his approbation of a godly life in the 
general, and of all that was good except that which the 
interest of his sinful cause engaged him to be against ; 
so I perceived that it was his design to do good in the 
main . . . more than any had done before him." 
Even against his will Baxter admits that the scheme 
worked reasonably well. Some rigid Independents, 
he says, were too hard upon Arminians. They were 
too long in seeking evidence of sanctification in the 
candidate, and not busy enough in scenting out his 
Antinomianism or his Anabaptism. Still they kept 
the churches free of the heedless pastor whose notion 
of a sermon was only a few good words patched to- 
gether to talk the people asleep on Sunday, while all 
the other days of the week he would go with them to 
the ale-house and harden them in sin. Cromwell him- 
self was an exemplary patron. ''Having near one half 
of the livings in England in his own immediate dis- 
posal, he seldom bestoweth one of them upon any man 
whom himself doth not first examine and make trial of 
in person, save only that at such times as his great 
affairs happen to be more urgent than ordinary, he 



THE PROTECTORATE'S FIRST STAGE 371 

nseth to appoint some other to do it in his behalf; 
which is so rare an example of piety that the like is not 
to be found in the stories of princes." 

His ideal was a state church, based upon a compre- 
hension from which Episcopalians were to be shut out. 
The exclusion was fatal to it as a final settlement. The 
rebellion itself, by arresting and diverting the liberal 
movement in progress within the church when the 
political outbreak first began, had forever made a real 
comprehension impossible. This is perhaps the heav- 
iest charge against it, and the gravest set-off against 
its indubitable gains. 

The mischief had been done in the years, roughly 
speaking, from 1643 to 1647, when some two thousand 
of the Episcopal clergy were turned out of their churches 
and homes vv'ith every circumstance of suffering and 
hardship. The authors of these hard proceedings did 
not foresee the distant issue, which made so deep and 
dubious a mark upon the social life of England for 
centuries to come. When the day of reaction arrived, 
less than twenty years later, it brought cruel reprisals. 
In 1662 the Episcopalians, when the wheel brought 
them uppermost, ejected two thousand nonconformists 
on the famous day of Saint Bartholomew, the patron 
saint of Christian enormities; and the nation fell 
asunder into the two standing camps of churchman and 
dissenter, which in their strife of so many ages for 
superiority on the one hand and equality on the other, 
did so much to narrow public spirit and pervert the 
noble ideal of national citizenship. This disastrous 
direction was first imparted to church polity by the 
Presbyterians, but Independents, when, in their turn 
of faction, they grasped power, did nothing to redress 
the wrong that their rivals had committed. 



CHAPTER II 

A QUARREL WITH PARLIAMENT 

WHITELOCKE, in his mission to Sweden ( 1653- 
1654), saw Oxenstierna, the renowned minister 
who had played so great a part in the history of Gus- 
tavus Adolphus and of the Protestant world — one of 
the sages, not too many of them on his own showing, 
who have tried their hand at the government of men. 
The chancellor enquired about Cromwell's age, health, 
children, family, and temper, and said that the things 
that he had done argued as much courage and wisdom 
as any actions that had been seen for many years. Still 
the veteran was not dazzled. He told Whitelocke that 
the new Protector's strength would depend upon the 
confirmation of his office by Parliament. As it was, 
it looked to him like an election by the sword, and the 
precedents of such elections had always proved dan- 
gerous and not peaceable, ever since the choice of Ro- 
man emperors by the legion. Christina, the queen, 
went deeper, and hit on a parallel more to the point. 
''Your general," she said, "hath done the greatest 
things of any man in the world ; the Prince of Conde 
is next to him, but short of him." Much of his story, 
she proceeded, "hath some parallel with that of my an- 
cestor Gustavus the First, who from a private gentle- 
man of a noble family was advanced to the title of 

372 



A QUARREL WITH PARLIAMENT 373 

Marshal of Sweden, because he had risen up and res- 
cued his country from the bondage and oppression 
which the King of Denmark had put upon them, and 
expelled that king; and for his reward he was at last 
elected King of Sweden, and I believe that your gen- 
eral will be King of England in conclusion." "Pardon 
me, Madam," replied the sedate Whitelocke, "that can- 
not be, because England is resolved into a Common- 
wealth : and my general hath already sufficient power 
and greatness, as general of all their forces both by sea 
and land, which may content him." "Resolve what 
you will," the queen insisted, "I believe he resolves to 
be king; and hardly can any power or greatness be 
called sufficient, when the nature of man is so prone as 
in these days to all ambition." Whitelocke could only 
say that he found no such nature in his general. Yet 
it needed no ambition, but only inevitable memory of 
near events, to recall to Cromwell the career of Gus- 
tavus Vasa, and we may be sure the case often flitted 
through his mind. 

Two Parliaments were held during the Protectorate, 
the first of them assembling in 1654 on the third of Sep- 
tember, the famous anniversary day of the Cromwel- 
lian calendar. It lasted barely five months. A glance 
at the composition of it was enough to disclose the ele- 
ments of a redoubtable opposition. The ghost of the 
Long Parliament was there in the persons of Brad- 
shaw, Scott, Hazelrigg, and others, and although Vane 
was absent, the spirit of irreconcilable alienation from 
a personal government resting on the drawn sword was 
both present and active. No Royalist was eligible, 
but the Presbyterians of what would now be called the 
extreme right were not far from Royalists, and even 
the Presbyterians of the center could have little ardor 
for a man and a system that marked the triumph of the 



374 OLIVER CROMWELL 

hated Independents. The material for combinations 
unfriendly to the government was only too evident. 

They all heard a sermon in Westminster Abbey, 
where the Protector had gone in his coach with pages, 
lackeys, lifeguards, in full state. Henry Cromwell 
and Lambert sat with him bareheaded in the coach, 
perhaps in their different ways the two most capable 
of all the men about him. After the sermon they 
crossed over from the Abbey to the Painted Chamber, 
and there Oliver addressed them in one of his strange 
speeches — not coherent, not smooth, not always even 
intelligible, but with a strain of high-hearted fervor 
in them that pierced through rugged and uncouth 
forms ; with the note of a strong man having great 
things to say, and wrestling with their very greatness 
in saying them ; often rambling, discursive, and over- 
loaded; often little better than rigmarole, even though 
the rigmarole be lighted now and again with the flash 
of a noble thought or penetrating phrase ; marked by a 
curious admixture of the tone of the statesman's coun- 
cil-chamber with the tone of the ranter's chapel ; still 
impressive by their laboring sincerity, by the weight of 
their topics, and by that which is the true force of all 
oratory worth talking about, the niomentum of the 
orator's history, personality, and purpose. 

The Protector opened on a high and characteristic 
note, by declaring his belief that they represented not 
only the interests of three great nations, but the in- 
terest of all the Christian world. This was no rhetor- 
ician's phrase, but a vivid and unchanging ideal in his 
mind after he had gained a position lofty enough to 
open to his gaze the prospect beyond the English 
shores. Here hyperbole ended, and the speech became 
a protest against the Leveling delusions of the Saints 
and the extremists ; a vindication of the policy of the 



A QUARREL WITH PARLIAMENT 375 

government in making peace abroad, and saving trea- 
sure and settling religion at home ; and an exhortation 
to a holy and gracious understanding of one another 
and their business. The deeply marked difference in 
tone from the language in which he had opened the 
Little Parliament indicates the growing reaction in 
the Protector's ow^n mind, and the rapidity with which 
he was realizing the loud call for conservative and 
governing quality in face of the revolutionary wreck- 
age. 

The specters of old dispute at once rose up. Those 
who could recall the quarrel between king and Parlia- 
ment found that after all nothing was settled, hardly 
even so much as that the government of the three 
kingdoms should be a Parliamentary government. 
The mutual suspicions of Parliament and army 
were as much alive as ever. The members no sooner 
returned to their own chamber than they began in- 
stantly to consider the constitution under which they 
existed. In other words, they took themselves seri- 
ously. No Parliament supposing itself clothed with 
popular authority could have been expected to accept 
without criticism a ready-made scheme of government 
fastened on it by a military junto. If the scheme was 
to be Parliamentary, nothing could be more certain 
than that Parliament itself must make it so. A Pro- 
tector by right of the army was as little tolerable to the 
new Parliament as a king by divine right had been to 
the old. They sat there by the authority of the good 
people of England, and how could it be contended that 
this authority did not include the right of judging the 
system on which the good people of England were 
henceforth to be governed? 

That was the very ground on which Oliver had 
quarreled with the Rump. Lie now dealt with the first 



376 OLIVER CROMWELL 

Parliament of the Protectorate as decisively, if not 
quite so passionately, as with the Parliament of the 
Commonwealth. After constitutional discussion had 
gone on for less than a fortnight, members one morn- 
ing found Westminster Hall and its approaches full of 
soldiers, the door of the House locked in their faces, 
and only the gruff explanation that the Protector de- 
sired them to meet him in the Painted Chamber. Here 
Oliver addressed them in language of striking force, 
winding up with an act of power after the model of 
Pride's Purge and the other arbitrary exclusions. His 
keynote was patient and argumentative remonstrance, 
but he did not mince his meaning and he took high 
ground. He reminded them that it was he who by the 
Instrument was laying down power, not assuming it. 
The authority he had in his hand, he told them, was 
boundless. It was only of his own will that on this 
arbitrary power he accepted limits. His acceptance 
was approved by a vast body of public opinion ; first by 
the soldiers, who were a very considerable part of these 
nations, when there was nothing to keep things in 
order but the sword ; second by the capital city of Lon- 
don, and by Yorkshire, the greatest county in England ; 
third by the judges of the land; and last of all by the 
Parliament itself. For had not the members been 
chosen on a written indenture, with the proviso that 
they should not have power to alter the government by 
a single person and a Parliament. Some things in the 
Instrument, he said, were fundamental, others were 
only circumstantial. The circumstantials they might 
try to amend as they might think best. But the four 
fundamentals — government by a single person and a 
Parliament, liberty of conscience as a natural right, the 
non-perpetuation of Parliament, the divided or bal- 
anced control of the militia — these were thinsfs not to 




From the portrait at Chequers Court, by permission of Mrs. Frankland-Russell-Astley. 
HENRY CROMWELL. 



A QUARREL WITH PARLIAMENT nj 

be parted with and not to be touched. "The wilful 
throwing away of this government, such as it is, so 
owned by God, so approved by men, were a thing- 
which, and in reference not to my good, but to the good 
of these nations and of posterity, I can sooner be will- 
ing to be rolled into my grave and buried with infamy, 
than I can give my consent unto." 

Then the stroke fell. As they had slighted the au- 
thority that called them, he told them that he had 
caused a stop to be put to their entrance into the Par- 
liament House, until they had signed a promise to be 
true and faithful to the Lord Protector and the Com- 
monwealth, and not to alter the government as settled 
in a single person and a Parliament. The test was 
certainly not a narrow nor a rigid one, and within a 
few days some three hundred out of the four hundred 
and sixty subscribed. The rest, including Bradshaw. 
Hazelig, and others of that stalwart group refused 
to sign, and went home. Such was the Protector's 
short way with a Parliamentary opposition. 

The purge was drastic, but it availed little. By the 
very law of its bemg the Parliament went on with the 
interrupted debate. Ample experience has taught us 
since those days that there is no such favorite battle- 
ground for party conflict as a revision of a constitution. 
They now passed a resolution making believe that 
Oliver's test was their own. They afifirmed the fun- 
damentals about the double seat of authority, about 
Oliver's Protectorate for life, about a Parliament every 
three years, as gravely as if members had not just 
signed a solemn promise not to reject them. Then 
they made their way through the rest of the two-and- 
forty articles of the Instrument, expanding them into 
sixty. They fought the question whether the Protec- 
torate should be hereditary, and by a large majority 



378 OLIVER CROMWELL 

decided that it should not. Protector and ParHament 
wrre to determine in conjuction what composed the 
doctrines within the pubHc profession of rehgion, and 
what on the other hand were damnable heresies; but 
these two things defined, then Parliament could pass 
bills dealing with heresies, or with the teaching and dis- 
cipline of established ministers, over the head of the 
Protector. On the all-important chapter of the mili- 
tary forces, the Parliament was as much bent upon ex- 
tending its association in authority with the Proteetor. 
as the Protector had in old days been bent upon the 
same thing in respect of King Charles. During his 
life Parliament was to have a voice in fixing the num- 
bers of the armed force; after his death, it was to de- 
cide the disposal of it; and the sum fixed for it was to 
be reconsidered by Parliament five years later. In all 
this there was nothing unreasonable, if Parliament was 
in reality to be a living organ. Such was the work of 
revision. 

It was now that Oliver realized that perhaps he 
might as well have tried to live with the Rump. We 
have already seen the words in which he almost said 
as much. The strange irony of events had brought 
him within sight of the doctrines of Strafford and of 
Charles, and showed him to have as little grasp of 
Parliamentary rule and as little love of it as either of 
them. He was determined not to accept the revised 
constitution. "Though some may think that it is an 
hard thing," he said, ''to raise money without Parlia- 
mentary authority upon this nation, yet I have another 
argument to the good people of this nation, whether 
they prefer having their will, though it be their de- 
struction, rather than comply with things of Neces- 
sity." But this is the principle of pure absolutism. 
Then as to the armed forces, though for the present 



A QUARREL WITH PARLIAMENT 379 

that the Protector should have in his power the mihtia 
seems the hardest thing, "yet, if the power of the militia 
should be yielded up at such a time as this, when there 
is as much need of it to keep this cause, as there was to 
get it for the sake of this cause,what would become of 
us all ?" If he were to yield up at any time the power 
of the militia, how could he do the good he ought, or 
hinder Parliament from making themselves perpetual, 
or imposing what religion they pleased upon men's 
conscience? 

In other words, Cromwell did not in his heart believe 
that any Parliament was to be trusted. He may have 
been right, but then this meant a dead-lock, and what 
way could be devised out of it? The representatives 
were assuredly not to blame for doing their l^est to 
convert government by the sword into that Parlia- 
mentary government which was the very object of the 
civil war, and which was still both the professed and 
the real object of Cromwell himself. What he did was 
to dissolve them at the first hour at which the Instru- 
ment gave him the right. 

A remarkable passage occurs in one of the letters of 
Henry Cromwell to Thurloe two years later (March 
4. 1657), which sheds a flood of light on this side of 
the Protectorate from its beginning to the end. The 
case could not be more wisely propounded. "I wish 
his highness could consider how casual [incalculable] 
the motions of a Parliament are, and how many of 
them are called before one be found to answer the ends 
thereof ; and that it is the natural genius of such great 
assemblies to be various, inconsistent, and for the most 
part froward with their superiors ; and therefore that 
he would not wholly reject so much of what they offer 
as is necessary to the public welfare. And the Lord 
gave him to see how much safer it is to rely upon 



38o OLIVER CROMWELL 

persons of estate, interest, integrity, and wisdom, than 
upon such as have so amply discovered their envy and 
ambition, and whose faculty it is by continuing of con- 
fusion to support themselves." How much safer, that 
is to say, to rely upon a Parliament with all its slovenly, 
slow, and froward ways, than upon a close junto of 
military grandees with a standing army at their back. 
This is what the nation also thought, and burned into 
its memory for a century to come. Here we have the 
master-key to Cromwell's failure as a constructive 
statesman. 



CHAPTER III 

THE MILITARY DICTATORSHIP 

WITH the dismissal of the first ParHament a 
new era began. For twenty months the Pro- 
tectorate was a system of despotic rule, as undisguised 
as that of Tudor or Stuart. Yet it was not the dicta- 
torship of Elizabeth, for Cromwell shared authority 
both in name and fact with the council, that is, with the 
leaders of the army. What were the working rela- 
tions between Oliver and the eighteen men who com- 
posed his Council of State, and to what extent his 
policy was inspired or modified by them, we cannot 
confidently describe. That he had not autocratic 
power, the episode of the kingship in 1657 will show 
us. That his hand was forced on critical occasions we 
know. 

The latter half of 1654 has sometimes been called 
the grand epoch of Oliver's government. Ireland and 
Scotland were in good order ; he had a surplus in the 
chest ; the army and navy seemed loyal ; his star was 
rising high among the European constellations. But 
below the surface lurked a thousand perils, and the 
difficulties of government were enormous. So hard 
must it inevitably be to carry on conservative policy 
without a conservative base of operations at any point 
of the compass. Oliver had reproached his Parlia- 
ment with making themselves a shade under which 

381 



382 OLIVER CROMWELL 

weeds and nettles, briars and thorns, had thriven. 
They were hke a man, he told them, who should protest 
about his liberty of walking abroad, or his right to take 
a journey, when all the time his house was in a blaze. 
The conspiracies against public order and the founda- 
tions of it were manifold. A serious plot for the Pro- 
tector's assassination had been brought to light in the 
summer of 1654, and Gerard and Vowel, two of the 
conspirators, had been put to death for it. They were 
to fall upon him as he took his customary ride out from 
Whitehall to Hampton Court on a Saturday afternoon. 
The king across the water was aware of Gerard's de- 
sign, and encouraged him in it in spite of some of his 
advisers who thought assassination impolitic. It was 
still a device in the manners of the age, and Oliver's 
share in the execution of the king was taken, in many 
minds to whom it might otherwise have been repug- 
nant, in his case to justify sinister retaliation. 

The schisms created in the republican camp by the 
dispersion of the old Parliament and the erection of 
the Protectorate naturally kindled new hopes in the 
breasts of the Royalists. Charles, with the sanguine 
credulity common to pretenders, encouraged them. If 
those, he told them, who wished the same thing only 
knew each other's mind, the work would be done with- 
out any difficulty. The only condition needed was a 
handsome appearance of a rising in one place, and then 
the rest would assuredly not sit still. All through the 
last six months of 1654 the Royalists were actively at 
work, under the direction of leaders at home in com- 
munication with Charles abroad. With the new year 
their hopes began to fade. The division common to all 
conspiracies broke out between the bold men and the 
prudent men. The Royalist council in England, 
known as the Sealed Knot, told the king in February 



THE MILITARY DICTATORSHIP 383 

that things were quite unripe : that no rising in the 
army was to be looked for, and this had been the mani- 
stay of their hopes ; that the fleet was for the usurper ; 
that insurrection would be their own destruction, and 
the consolidation of their foes. The fighting section, 
on the other hand, were equally ready to charge the 
Sealed Knot with being cold and backward. They 
pressed the point that Cromwell had full knowledge of 
the plot and of the men engaged in it, and that it 
would be harder for him to crush them now than later. 
Time would enable him to compose quarrels in his 
army, as he had so often composed them before. In 
the end the king put himself in the hands of the for- 
ward men, the conspiracy was pushed on, and at length 
in March the smoldering fire broke into a flickering 
and feeble flame. This is not the only time that an 
abortive and insignificant rising has proved to be the 
end of a wide-spread and dangerous combination. In 
Ireland we have not seldom seen the same, just as in 
the converse way formidable risings have followed 
what looked like insignificant conspiracies. 

The Yorkshire Royalists met on the historic ground 
of Marston Moor, and reckoned on surprising York 
with a force of four thousand men ; when the time 
came, a hundred made their appearance, and in despair 
they flung away their arms and dispersed. In North- 
umberland the cavaliers were to seize Newcastle and 
Tynemouth, but here, too, less than a hundred of them 
ventured to the field. At Rufford in Sherwood Forest 
there was to have been a gathering of several hundred, 
involving gentlemen of consequence; but on the ap- 
pointed day, though horses and arms were ready, the 
country would not stir. At midnight the handful 
cried in a fright that they were betrayed, and made off 
as fast as they could. Designs were planned in Staf- 



384 OLIVER CROMWELL 

fordshire, Cheshire, Shropshire, but they came to 
nothing, and not a blow was struck. Every county in 
England, said Thurloe, instead of rising for them 
would have risen against them. The Protector, he 
declared, if there had been any need, could have drawn 
into the field, within fourteen days, twenty thousand 
men, besides the standing army. "So far are they 
mistaken who dream that the affections of this people 
are toward the House of Stuart." ^ 

The only momentary semblance of success was what 
is known as Penruddock's rising in the west. A band 
of Wiltshire Royalists rode into Salisbury, seized in 
their beds the judges who happened to be on circuit, 
and the wilder blades were 'even for hanging them. 
But they could not get the greasy caps flung up for 
King Charles in Wilts, nor did better success await 
them in Dorset and Somerset. They were never more 
than four hundred. Even these numbers soon dwin- 
dled, and within three or four days a Cromwellian 
captain broke in upon them at South Molton, took 
most of them prisoners, and the others made off. Wag- 
staffe, one of the two principals, escaped to Holland, 
and Penruddock, the other, was put upon his trial along 
with a number of his confederates. It is curious that 
this was the first time that treason against the govern- 
ment had been submitted to juries since 1646, and the 
result justified the confident hopes of a good issue. 
Thirty-nine offenders were condemned, but some of 
them Cromwell reprieved — "his course," says Thurloe, 
"being to use lenity rather than severity." Only some 
fourteen or fifteen suffered death, including Pen- 
ruddock. 

In the army, though there was no disaffection, a 

1 March i6, 1655. See Mr, Firth's examination of the 
rising in "English Historical Review," 1888-89. 



THE MILITARY DICTATORSHIP 385 

mutinous section was little less busy than the Royalists. 
Harrison, who had been in charge of King Charles on 
his fatal journey from Hurst Castle to Windsor, was 
now himself sent a prisoner to Carisbrooke. Wildman, 
who had been one of the extremist agitators so far 
back as 1647, ^^'^^ arrested, and the guard found him 
writing a "declaration of the free and well-affected 
people of England now in arms against the tyrant 
Oliver Cromwell, Esciuire." It is no irrational docu- 
ment on the face of it, being little more than a re- 
statement of the aims of the revolution for twelve 
years past. But it is not always palatable for men in 
power to be confronted with their aims in opposition. 
The Protector spared no money in acquiring infor- 
mation. He expended immense sums in secret service, 
and little passed in the Royalist camp abroad that was 
not discovered by the agents of Thurloe. Cecil and 
Walsingham were not more vigilant or more success- 
ful in their watch over the safety of Elizabeth than 
was Cromwell's wise, trusty, and unwearied secretary 
of state. Plotters were so amazed how the Lord Pro- 
tector came to hear of all the things contrived against 
him that they fell back on witchcraft and his familiar- 
ity with the devil. A gentleman got leave to travel, 
and had an interview with the king at Cologne one 
evening after dark. On his return, he saw the Pro- 
tector, who asked him if he had kept his promise not 
to visit Charles Stuart. The gentleman answered that 
he had. But who was it, asked Cromwell, that put 
out the candles when you saw Charles Stuart? He 
further startled the traveler by asking whether Charles 
had not sent a letter by him. The gentleman denied, 
Cromwell took his hat, found a letter sewn up in the 
lining of it, and sent him to the Tower. Cromwell's 
informant was one Manning, and this transaction was 

25 



386 OLIVER CROMWELL 

his ruin. The RoyaHsts at Cologne suspected him, 
his rooms were searched, his ciphers discovered, and 
his correspondence read. Manning then made a clean 
breast of it, and excused his treason by his necessities, 
and the fact that he was to have twelve hundred pounds 
a year from Cromwell for his work. His only chance 
of life was a threat of retaliation by Cromwell on some 
Royalist in prison in England, but this was not forth- 
coming, and Manning was shot dead by two gentlemen 
of the court in a wood near Cologne. 

On every side the government struck vigorous 
blows. Especial watch was kept upon London. Orders 
were sent to the ports to be on guard against surprise, 
and to stop suspected persons. The military forces 
were strengthened. Gatherings were put down. 
Many arbitrary arrests were made among minor per- 
sons and major ; and many were sent to Barbadoes to 
a condition of qualified slavery. The upright and 
blameless Overton was arbitrarily flung into prison 
. without trial, kept there for three years, and not re- 
leased until after Cromwell's death and the revival of 
Parliament. When that day arrived both Thurloe 
and Barkstead, the governor of the Tower, quaked for 
the strong things that they had done on the personal 
authority of the Protector. The stories told in 1659 
are a considerable deduction from Burke's praise of the 
admirable administration of the law under Cromwell. 
But though there was lawless severity, it did not often 
approach ferocity. 

Subterranean plots and the risings of hot-headed 
country gentlemen were not all that Cromwell and the 
council had to encounter. The late Parliament had 
passed no effective vote of money. The government 
fell back upon its power of raising taxes by ordinance. 
The validity of the ordinance was disputed ; the judges 



THE MILITARY DICTATORSHIP 387 

inclined to hold the objections good; and it looked for 
a moment as if a general refusal to pay customs and 
excise might bring the whole financial fabric to the 
ground. The three counsel for Cony, the merchant 
who had declined to pay the customs dues, were sum- 
moned before the Protector and the Council of State. 
After hearing what they had to say, Oliver signed a 
warrant for their committal to the Tower for using 
words tending to sedition and subversive of the gov- 
ernment. Violation of the spirit and letter of the law 
could go no further. They were soon set free, and 
Cromwell bore them no malice, but the people not un- 
reasonably saw in the proceeding a strong resemblance 
to the old Star Chamber. The judges were sent for, 
and humbly said something about Magna Charta. 
The Protector scoffed at Magna Charta with a mock 
too coarse for modern manners, declared that it should 
not control actions which he knew to be required by 
public safety, reminded them that it was he who made 
them judges, and bade them no more to suffer the 
lawyers to prate what it would not become them to 
hear. The judges may have been wrong either in their 
construction of the Instrument, or in their view that a 
section of the Instrument did not make a good law. 
But the committal of three counsel to prison by the 
executive, because their arguments were too good to be 
convenient, w^as certainly not good law whatever else 
it was. Judges who proved not complaisant enough 
were displaced. Sir Peter Wentworth, who had tried 
to brave Cromwell at the breaking up of the Long Par- 
liament, tried to brave him now by bringing a suit 
against the tax collector. The Protector haled him 
before the council ; Wentworth said that he had been 
moved by his constant principle that no money could 
be levied but by consent of Parliament. Cromwell 



388 OLIVER CROMWELL 

commanded him to drop his suit, and Wentworth 
submitted. 

The Protector never shrank in these days from 
putting his defense in all its breadth. "If nothing 
should be done/' he said with scorn, "but what is ac- 
cording to law, the throat of the nation might be cut 
while we send for some one to make a law. It is a 
pitiful notion to think, though it be for ordinary gov- 
ernment to live by law and rule — yet if a government 
in extraordinary circumstances go beyond the law, it 
is to be clamored at and blottered at." Sometimes he 
was not afraid to state the tyrant's plea even more 
broadly still. "The ground of Necessity for justify- 
ing of men's actions is above all considerations of in- 
stituted law, and if this or any other State should go 
about to make laws against events, against what Jiiay 
happen, then I think it is obvious to any man they will 
be making laws against Providence ; events and issues 
of things being from God alone, to whom all issues 
belong." As if all law were not in its essence a device 
against contingent cases. Nevertheless these pious 
disguises of what was really no more than common 
reason of state, just as reason of state is always used 
whether by bad men or by good, do not affect the fact 
that Cromwell in his heart knew the value of legality 
as well as anybody that ever held rule, only he was the 
least fortunate of men in affecting his aim. 

"It was now," says Oliver, "we did find out a little 
poor invention, which I hear has been much regretted ; 
I say there was a little thing invented, which was the 
erection of your major-generals." This device had all 
the virtues of military simplicity. In the summer and 
autumn of 1655 England and Wales were mapped out 
into a dozen districts. Over each district was planted 
a major-general, Lambert, Desborough, Fleetwood, 




From the portrait at Chequers Court, by permission of Mrs. Frankland-Russell-Astley. 
JOHN THURLOE, SECRETARY TO OLIVER CROMWELL. 



THE MILITARY DICTATORSHIP 389 

Skippon, Whalley, Barkstead, Goffe, and the rest, all 
picked veterans and the trustiest of them. Their first 
duties were those of high pohce, to put down unlawful 
assemblies by force; to disarm Papists and persons 
dangerous to the peace of the nation; to exact a bond 
from any householder considered to be disaffected 
for the good behavior of his servants, and the servants 
were to appear before the major-general or his deputy 
wherever and whenever called upon. Persons in this 
category were to be registered, and if they changed 
their abode, the major-general was to be informed. 
Anybody coming from beyond the sea was to report 
himself, and his later movements were to be followed 
and recorded. The major-general was further to keep 
a sharp eye upon scandalous ministers, and to see that 
no disaffected person should take any share in the edu- 
cation of youth. 

All this, however, was the least material part of the 
new policy. The case for the change rested on the 
danger of more daring plots and more important ris- 
ings, the inadequateness of local justices and parish 
constables, the need of the central government for 
hands and eyes of its own, finally on the shadows of 
division in the army. There were those in the late 
Parliament who thought the peril inconsiderable, but 
Thurloe tells us that, "his Highness saw a necessity 
of raising more force, and in every county, unless he 
would give up his cause to the enemy." This involved 
a new standing militia for all the counties of England, 
and that again involved a new money charge. "What 
so just as to put the charge upon those whose disaffec- 
tion was the cause of it?" Such a plan needed no more 
than the "decimation" of those against whom, after 
personal inquisition made, they chose to set the mark of 
delinquency or disaffection. From such persons they 



390 OLIVER CROMWELL 

were instructed to exact one tenth of their annual in- 
come. For these exactions there was no pretense of 
law ; nor could they be brought into the courts, the only 
appeal being to the Protector in Council. The Parlia- 
ment had been dissolved for meddling with the Instru- 
ment of Government. Yet all this was contrary to the 
Instrument. The scheme took some time to complete, 
but by the last three months of 1655 it was in full 
operation. 

Two other remarkable measures of repression be- 
long to this stern epoch. An edict was passed for 
securing the peace of the Commonwealth (November, 
1655), ordering that no ejected clergyman should be 
kept in any gentleman's house as chaplain or tutor, or 
teach in a school, or baptize, or celebrate marriages, or 
use the Prayer Book. That this was a superfluity of 
rigor is shown by the fact that it was never executed. 
It is probable that other measures of the time went 
equally beyond the real necessities of the crisis, for ex- 
perience shows that nothing is ever so certain to be 
overdone as th^^ policy of military repression against 
civil disaffection. The second measure was still more 
significant of the extent to which despotic reaction was 
going in the methods of the government. Orders were 
issued that no person whatever do presume to publish 
in print any matter of public news or intelligence with- 
out leave of the secretary of state. The result of this 
was to reduce the newspaper press in the capital of the 
country to a single journal coming out twice a week 
under two different names. Milton was still Latin 
secretary, and it was only eleven years since the ap- 
pearance of his immortal plea for unlicensed printing. 

"Our ministers are bad,'' one of the major-generals 
reports in 1655, "our magistrates idle, and the people 
all asleep." The new authorities set resolutely to 



THE MILITARY DICTATORSHIP 391 

work. They appointed commissioners to assess the 
decimation of dehnquents, not however without con- 
stant reference to the Protector and Council for direc- 
tions how individuals were to be dealt with. The 
business of taxing the Cavaliers in this high manner 
was "of wonderful acceptation to all the Parliament 
party, and men of all opinions joined heartily therein." 
That men of one opinion should heartily rejoice at the 
compulsory exaction of rates and taxes from men of 
another opinion, is in accord with human nature : not 
that the activity of the major-generals prevented the 
imposition of a general property tax in 1656. The 
Cavaliers submitted with little ado. Wider irritation 
was created by stringent interference with ale houses, 
bear-baiting, and cock-fighting. Lord Exeter came to 
ask Whalley whether he would allow the Lady Grant- 
ham cup to be run for at Lincoln, for if so he would 
start a horse. "I assured him," reports Whalley to 
the Protector, "that it was not your Highness' inten- 
tion in the suppression of horse-races, to abridge gen- 
tlemen of that sport, but to prevent the great conflu- 
ences of irreconcilable enemies" : ana Exeter had his 
race. Profane and idle gentry whose lives were a 
shame to a Christian commonwealth were hunted out, 
and the government were adjured to banish them. 
"We have imprisoned here," writes the choleric major- 
general in Shropshire, "divers lewd fellows, some for 
having a hand in the plot, others of dissolute life, as 
persons dangerous to the peace of the nation : amongst 
others those papists who went a-hunting when they 
were sent for by Major Waring; they are desperate 
persons, and divers of them fit to grind sugar-cane or 
plant tobacco, and if some of them were sent into the 
Indies, it would do much good." One personage when 
reprimanded warned the major-general that if he were 



392 OLIVER CROMWELL 

sent to prison it would cause the godly to pour forth 
prayers and tears before the Lord. The staunch officer 
replied that thousands of men in tears would never dis- 
quiet him, if he knew that he was doing his duty in the 
way of Providence. 

The only defense of reason of state is success, and 
here the result soon proved to be not success but failure. 
While so many individuals and orders were exasper- 
ated, no great class of society was reconciled. Rigid 
order was kept, plotters were cowed, money was 
squeezed, but the keenest discontent was quickened in 
all those various orr- ^ized bodies of men ^^'ith lively 
minds and energetic interests, by whom in the long 
run effective public opinion in every community is gen- 
erated. Oliver must soon have seen that his change of 
system would cut up his policy of healing and con- 
ciliation by its roots. 



CHAPTER IV 



THE REACTION 



WANT of money has ever been the wholesome 
check on king-s, on Parh'-^ments, and cabinets, 
and now in his turn it pinched tii i'rotector. In spite 
of the decimation screw, the militia often went short 
of their pay, and suffered both trouble and jeers in 
consequence. Apart from the cost of domestic ad- 
ministration, Cromwell had embarked, as we shall see, 
on a course of intervention abroad ; and he was soon in 
the same straits as those against which Strafford had 
long ago warned his master, as the sure result of a 
foreign policy to be paid for by discontented subjects. 
In June, 1656, the Protector held a conference with 
his council and some of the principal officers of the 
army. There were those who advised him to raise 
money on his own direct authority by forced loans or 
general taxation. There is reason to suppose that 
Cromwell himself leaned this way, for before long he 
chid the officers for urging the other course. The de- 
cision, however, was taken to call a new Parliament. 

The election that went forward during the summer 
of 1656 had all the rough animation of the age and 
well deserves consideration. Thurloe writes to Henry 
Cromwell that there is the greatest striving to get into 
Parliament that ever was known ; every faction is be- 
stirring itself with all its might; and all sorts of dis- 

393 



394 OLIVER CROMWELL 

contented people are incessant in their endeavors. The 
major-generals on their side were active in electioneer- 
ing arts, and their firmly expressed resignation to the 
will of over-ruling Providence did not hinder the most 
alert wire-pulling. They pressed candidates of the 
right color, and gave broad hints as to any who were 
not sober and suitable to the present work. Every 
single major-general was himself a candidate and was 
elected. At Dover the rabble were strong for Cony, 
who had fought the case of the customs dues, and the 
major-general thinks he was likely to be elected unless 
he could be judiciously "secluded." At Preston, once 
the scene of perhaps the most critical of all Cromwell's 
victories, the major-general expected much thwarting, 
through the peevishness of friends and the disaffection 
of enemies. In Norwich an opposition preacher of 
great popularity was forbidden to go into the pulpit. 
A sharp eye was kept upon all printed matter finding 
its way through the post. Whalley reports that the 
heart is sound in what he calls the mediterranean part 
of the nation ; people know that money will be wanted 
by the government, but they will not grudge it as the 
price of a settlement. At the same time he is unhappy 
lest Colonel Hutchinson or Sir Arthur Hazelrig 
should get in, just as his superiors dreaded the return 
of Sergeant Bradshaw and Sir Henry Vane. Des- 
borough is uneasy about the west, but he makes it his 
business to strengthen the hands of the honest sober 
people, leaving the issue to the wise Disposer. 

Norfolk was one of the most alarming cases. "If 
other counties should do as this," says the major-gen- 
eral, "it would be a sufficient alarum to stand upon our 
guard, the spirit of the people being most strangely 
heightened and molded into a very great aptness to 
take the first hint for an insurrection, and the county 
especially so disposed may most probably begin the 



THE REACTION 395 

scene." He suggests that preparations for calling out 
the militia would be a sensible encouragement for 
the friends of the government. At Ipswich, when the 
writ was read, somebody rose and complained of the 
reference to his Highness' Parliament; the king had 
never called it his Parliament ; and such an innovation 
should be a warning not to vote for swordmen nor for 
the Protector's friends ; thereupon another called out 
that they were all his friends. One opposition can- 
didate assured his audience that his Highness had sent 
for three thousand Swiss to be his body-guard ; that 
he had secretly sold the trade of England to the Dutch, 
and would grant no convoy from Holland; that most 
of the counties in England would bring up their num- 
bers in thousands, in spite of Oliver and his redcoats ; 
and that he would wager his life that not five hundred 
in the whole army wouM resist them. Another cry 
was that the free people of England would have no 
more swordmen, no more decimators, nor anybody in 
receipt of a salary from the State. 

"On Monday last," writes Goffe, 'T spoke with Mr. 
Cole of Southampton, whom I find to be a perfect 
Leveler — he is called by the name of Common Free- 
dom. He told me he was where he was, and where the 
army was seven years ago, and pulled out of his pocket 
the 'Agreement of the People.' He told me he would 
promise me not to disperse any of those books, and that 
it was his intention to live peaceable, for that he knew 
a war was not so easily ended as begun. Whereupon, 
with the best exhortation I could give him, I dismissed 
him for the present. . . . Mr. Cole is very angry 
at the Spanish war, and saith we deal most ungrate- 
fully with them, for that they were so civil to us in 
the time of our late difference, and that all our trade 
will be lost." 

An energetic manifesto was put out against the 



396 OLIVER CROMWELL 

government, stating with unusual force the reasons 
why dear Christian friends and brethren should bestir 
themselves in a day of trouble, rebuke, and blasphemy ; 
why they should make a stand for the pure principles 
of free-born Englishmen against the power and pomp 
of any man, however high he might bear himself. 
Half the books in the Old Testament are made to 
supply examples and warnings, and Hezekiah and 
Sennacherib, Jethro and Moses, Esther, Uzzah, Absa- 
lom, are all turned into lessons of what a voter should 
do or abstain from doing. The whole piece gives an in- 
structive glimpse of the state of mind of the generation. 
Earnest remonstrances are addressed to those who 
think that God has gone out of Parliaments, and that 
the time for Christ's kingdom is come. Others iiold 
that the Protector had at least given them liberty of 
conscience in worshiping God, a thing worth all else 
put together, and a thing that Parliament might very 
likely take away. Some again insist that elections are 
of no purpose, because the Protector with his redcoats 
will very soon either make members do what he wants, 
or else pack them off home again. All these partizans 
of abstention — the despair of party managers in every 
age — are faithfully dealt with, and the manifesto closes 
with the hackneyed asseverations of all oppositions, an- 
cient and modern, that if only the right sort of Parlia- 
ment were returned burdens would be eased, trade 
would revive, and the honor of the country now lying 
in the dust among all nations would be immediately 
restored. Did not their imprisoned friends speak? 
Did not their banished neighbors speak ? Did not their 
infringed rights speak? Did not their invaded prop- 
erties speak? Did not their affronted representatives 
who had been trodden upon with scorn, speak? Did 
not the blood of many thousands speak, some slain 



THE REACTION 397 

with the sword, others killed with hunger; witness 
Jamaica? Did not the cries of their honest seamen 
speak, the wall and bulwark of our nation, and now so 
barbarously forced from wives and children to serve 
the ambitions and fruitless designs of one man? 

By way of antidote the major-generals were armed 
with letters from the Protector and instructions from 
Thurloe, and any one found in possession of a bundle 
of the seditious documents was quickly called to sharp 
account. Earlier in the summer Sir Henry Vane had 
put out a pamphlet without his name, which at first was 
popular, and then on second thoughts was found im- 
practicable, because it simply aimed at the restoration 
of the Long Parliament. Vane was haled before the 
Council (August 21), where he admitted the writing 
and publishing of the "Healing Question," though in 
dark and mysterious terms, as his manner was. He 
was ordered to give security, refused, and was sent to 
prison at Carisbrooke, where he lay until the end of the 
year. An attempt was made to punish Bradshaw by 
removing him from his office of Chief-Justice of Chesh- 
ire, but the council changed their mind. The well- 
directed activity of the major-general was enough to 
prevent Bradshaw's return for that county, and he 
failed elsewdiere. So the Protector was free of those 
who passed for the two leading incendiaries. 

The Parliament met in September, 1656, and Oliver 
adddressed it in one of his most characteristic speeches. 
He appealed at great length to the hatred of Spain, on 
the standing ground of its bondage to the Pope ; for 
its evil doings upon Englishmen in the West Indies, 
■for its espousal of the Stuart interest. Then he 
turned to the unholy friendliness at home between 
Papists, all of them ''Spaniolized," and Cavaliers; be- 
tween some of the Republicans and Royalists ; between 



398 OLIVER CROMWELL 

some of the Commonwealth men and some of the mire 
and dirt thrown up by the revolutionary waters. He 
recalled all the plots and the risings and attempted 
risings, and warned them against the indolent suppo- 
sition that such things were no more than the nibbling 
of a mouse at one's heel. For the major-generals and 
their decimation of Royalist delinquents, he set up a 
stout defense. Why was it not righteous to make that 
party pay for the suppression of disorder which had 
made the charge necessary? Apart from the mere 
preservation of the peace, was it not true that the 
major-generals had been more effectual for dis- 
countenancing vice and settling religion than anything 
done these fifty years? The mark of the cavalier in- 
terest was profaneness, disorder, and wickedness; the 
profane nobility and gentry, that w'as the interest that 
his officers had been engaged against. "If it lives in 
us, I say, if it be in the general heart, it is a thing I 
am confident our liberty and prosperity depend upon — 
reformation of manners. By this you will be more 
repairer of breaches than by anything in the world. 
Truly these things do respect the souls of men and the 
spirits — which arc the men. The mind is the man. 
If that be kept pure, a man signifies somewhat; if not, 
I would very fain see what difference there is between 
him and a beast." 

In the mighty task that was laid upon them, it was 
no neutral or Laodicean spirit that would do. With 
the instinct of a moral leader, with something more 
than trick of debate or a turn of tactics, Cromwell told 
them : "Doubting, hesitating men, they are not fit for 
your work. You must not expect that men of hesi- 
tating spirits, under the bondage of scruples, will be 
able to carry on this work. Do not think that men of 
this sort will ever rise to such a spiritual heat for the 



THE REACTION 399 

nation as shall carry you a cause like this ; as will meet 
all the oppositions that the devil and wicked men can 
make." Then he winds up with three high passages 
from the Psalms, with no particular bearing on their 
session, but in those days well fitted to exalt men's 
hearts, and surrounding the temporal anxieties of the 
hour with radiant visions from another sphere for the 
diviner mind. 

Of the real cause of their assembling, deficit, and 
debts, the Protector judiciously said little. As he ob- 
served of himself on another occasion — and the double 
admission deserves to be carefully marked — he was not 
much better skilled in arithmetic than he was in law, 
and his statement of accounts would certainly not 
satisfy the standards of a modern exchequer. In- 
capacity of legal apprehension, and incapacity in 
finance, are a terrible drawback in a statesman with a 
new state to build. Before business began, the Pro- 
tector took precautions after his own fashion against 
the opposition critics. He and the council had already 
pondered the list of members returned to the Parlia- 
ment, and as the government made their way from the 
Painted Chamber to their House, soldiers were found 
guarding the door. There was no attempt to hide the 
iron hand in velvet glove. The clerk of the Common- 
wealth was planted in the lobby with certificates of the 
approval of the Council of State. Nearly a hundred 
found no such tickets, and for them there was no ad- 
mission. This strong act of purification was legal 
under the Instrument, and the House when it was re- 
ported, was content with making an order that the per- 
sons shut out should apply to the council for its appro- 
bation. The excluded members, of whose fidelity to 
his government Cromwell could not be sure, comprised 
a faithful remnant of the Long Parliament; and they 



400 OLIVER CROMWELL 

and others, ninety-three in number, signed a remon- 
strance in terms that are a strident echo of the protests 
which had so often l^een launched in old days against 
the king. Vehemently they denounced the practise 
of the tyrant to use the name of God and religion and 
formal fasts and prayer to color the blackness of the 
fact ; and to command one hundred, two hundred, or 
three hundred to depart, and to call the rest a Parlia- 
ment by way of countenancing his oppression. The 
present assembly at Westminster, they protested, sits 
under the daily awe and terror of the Lord Protector's 
armed men, not daring to consult or debate freely the 
great concernments of their country, nor daring to 
oppose his usurpation and oppression, and no such 
assembly can be the representative body of England. 
W^e may be sure that if such was the temper of nearly 
one fourth of a Parliament that was itself just — 
chosen vmder close restrictions — this remonstrance 
gives a striking indication how little way had even yet 
been made by Cromwell in converting popular opinion 
to his support. 



CHAPTER V 



A CHANGE OF TACK 



THE Parliament speedily showed signs that, win- 
nowed and sifted as it had been, and loyally as it 
always meant to stand to the person of the Protector, 
yet like the Rump, like the Barebones" Convention, 
and like the first Parliament under the Instrument, 
all of them, one after another, banished in disgrace, it 
was resolved not to be a cipher in the constitution, but 
was full of that spirit of corporate self-esteem without 
which any Parliament is a body void of soul. The 
elections had taught them that the rule of the sword- 
men and the decimators was odious even to the honest 
party in the country. Oliver anxiously watching the 
signs of public feeling had probably learned the same 
lesson, that his major-generals were a source of weak- 
ness and not of strength to his government. The 
hour had come when the long struggle between army 
and Parliament which in various forms had covered 
nine troubled years, was to enter a fresh and closing- 
phase. The nation, whether Royalist or Puritan, had 
shown itself as a whole bitterly averse to the trans- 
formation of the ancient realm of England into a mili- 
tary state, and with this aversion, even from the early 
days of barrack debates at Windsor and Putney, Oliver 
was in perfect sympathy. Neither the habitudes of the 
camp, nor the fact that his own power which he rightly 
^^ 401 



402 OLIVER CROMWELL 

identified with public order, had always depended and 
must still depend upon the army, dulled his instinct or 
weakened his desire that the three kingdoms should be 
welded, not into a soldier state, but into a civil con- 
stitution solidly reposing on its acceptance by the na- 
tion. We cannot confidently divine the workings of 
that capacious, slow, and subtle mind, but this quick- 
ened perception seems to be the key to the dramatic 
episode that was now approaching. 

The opportunity for disclosing the resolve of the 
Parliament to try a fall with the military power soon 
came. It was preceded by an incident that revealed 
one of the dangers, so well known to Oliver, and 
viewed by him with such sincere alarm as attending 
any kind of free Parliament whether this or another. 
The general objects of the new Parliament of 1656, 
like the objects of its immediate predecessor of 1654, 
were to widen the powers of Parliament, to limit those 
of the Protector, to curb the soldiers, and finally, al- 
though this was kept in discreet shade, to narrow the 
area of religious tolerance. A test of tolerance oc- 
curred almost at once. Excesses of religious emotion 
were always a sore point with Protestant reformers, 
for all such excesses seemed a warrant for the bitter 
predictions of the Catholics at the Reformation, that 
to break with the church was to open the flood-gates of 
extravagance and blasphemy in the heart of unregen- 
erate man. Hence nobody was so infuriated as the 
partisan of private judgment with those who carried 
private judgment beyond a permitted point. 

James Nayler was an extreme example of the 
mystics whom the hard children of this world dismiss 
as crazy fanatics. For several years he had fought 
with good repute in the Parliamentary army, and he 
was present on the memorable day of Dunbar. Then 



A CHANGE OF TACK 403 

he joined George Fox, by-and-by carried Quaker prin- 
ciples to a higher pitch, and in time gave to his faith a 
personal turn by allowing enthusiastic disciples to 
salute him as the Messiah. In October, 1656, he rode 
into Bristol, attended by a crowd of frantic devotees, 
some of them casting branches on the road, all chant- 
ing loud hosannas, several even vowing that he had 
miraculously raised them from the dead. For his 
share in these transactions Nayler was brought before 
a committee of Parliament. No sworn evidence was 
taken. Nobody proved that he had spoken a word. 
The worst that could be alleged was that he had taken 
part in a hideous parody. The House found that he 
was guilty of blasphemy, that he was a grand impostor, 
and a seducer of the people. It was actually proposed 
to inflict the capital sentence, and the offender only es- 
caped death by a majority of fourteen, in a division of 
a hundred and seventy-eight members. The debate 
lasted over many days. The sentence finally imposed 
was this : To stand in the pillory two hours at West- 
minster; to be whipped by the hangman from West- 
minster to the old Exchange, and there to undergo 
another two hours' pillory; to have his tongue bored 
through with a hot iron; to be branded on the brow 
with the letter B ; then to be sent to Bristol, carried on 
a horse barebacked with his face to the tail, and there 
again whipped in the market-place; thence to be 
brought back to London, to be put into solitary confine- 
ment with hard labor during the pleasure of Parlia- 
ment, without use of pen, ink, or paper. So hideous 
a thing could Puritanism be, so little was there in 
many things to choose between the spirit of Laud and 
the hard hearts of the people who cut off Laud's head. 
Cromwell showed his noblest quality. The year be- 
fore he had interposed by executive act to remove John 



404 OLIVER CROMWELL 

Biddle, charged with Socinian heresy, from the grasp 
of the courts. Cromwell denounced the blasphemy of 
denying the godhead of Jesus Christ, but he secluded 
Biddle from harm by sending him to Scilly with an 
allowance of ten shillings a week and a supply of books. 
So now in Nayler's case he hated the cruelty, and h^ 
saw the mischief of the assumption by Parliament of the 
function of a court of law. The most ardent friends 
of Parliament must still read with a lively thrill the 
words that Oliver now addressed to the Speaker: 
"Having taken notice of a judgment lately given by 
yourselves against one James Nayler; although we 
detest and abhor the giving or occasioning the least 
countenance to persons of such opinions and practice. 
Yet we, being interested in the present gov- 
ernment on behalf of the people of these nations ; and 
not knowing how far such proceeding, entered into 
wholly without us, may extend in the consequence of 
it — Do desire that the House will let us know the 
grounds and reasons whereupon they have proceeded." 
(December 12, 1656.) This rebuke notw^ithstanding. 
the execrable sentence was carried out to the letter. 
It galled Cromwell to find that under the Instrument 
he had no power to interfere with the Parliamentary 
assumption of judicial attributes, and this became an 
additional reason for that grand constitutional revision 
which was now coming into sight. 

A few days after the disposal of Nayler a bill was 
brought in that raised the great Cjuestion of the major- 
generals, their arbitrary power, and their unlawful 
decimations. By the new bill the system was to be 
continued. The lawyers argued strongly against it, 
and the members of the Council of State and the major- 
generals themselves were of course as strongly for it. 
The debate was long and heated, for both sides under- 



A CHANGE OF TACK 405 

stood that the issue was grave. When the final divi- 
sion was taken, the bill was thrown out by a majority of 
thirty-six in a House of two hundred and twelve. One 
curious result of the legislative union of the three king- 
doms of which the world has heard only too much in 
later days, was now first noted. "The major-generals are 
much offended at the Irish and Scottish members who, 
being much united, do sway exceedingly by their votes. 
I hope it will be for the best : or if the proverb be true 
that the fox fares best when he is curst, those that serve 
for Ireland will bring home some good things for their 
country." No Catholics were either electors or eli- 
gible, and the Irish who thus helped to hold the balance 
were of course the colonists from England and Scot- 
land. 

"Some gentlemen," Thurloe tells Henry Cromwell, 
"do think themselves much trampled upon by this vote 
against their bill, and are extrem.ely sensible thereof." 
That is to say, most of the major-generals, with the 
popular and able Lambert at their head, recognized 
that the vote was nothing less than a formal decision 
against the army and its influences. So bold a chal- 
lenge from a Parliament in whose election and puri- 
fication they had taken so prominent a part, roused 
sharp anger, and the consequences of it were immedi- 
ately visible in the next and more startling move. 
Cromwell's share in either this first event, or in that 
which now followed, is as obscure as his share in the 
removal of the king from Holmby, or in Pride's Purge, 
or in the resolve to put Charles to death. The im- 
pression among the leaders of the army undoubtedly 
seems to have been that in allowing the recent vote, the 
Lord Protector had in effect thrown his major-generals 
over. 

As we are always repeating to ourselves, Cromwell 



4o6 OLIVER CROMWELL 

from 1647 had shown himself ready ro follow events 
rather than go before. He was sometimes a consti- 
tutional ruler, sometimes a dictator, sometimes the 
agent of the barrack, each in turn as events appeared 
to point and to demand. Now he reverted to the part 
of constitutional ruler. The elections and the Parlia- 
ment showed him that the "little invention" of the 
major-generals had been a mistake, but he was not so 
sure of this as to say so. Ominous things happened. 
Desborough, his brother-in-law, brought in the bill, but 
Claypole, his son-in-law, was the first to oppose it. An- 
other kinsman in the House denounced the major-gen- 
erals roundly. People told him he would get a rating 
when next he visited Whitehall. Nothing daunted, he 
repaired to the Protector, and stood to what he had 
said with papers to prove his case. His Highness 
answered him with raillery, and taking a rich scarlet 
cloak from his back and gloves from his hands threw 
them to his kinsman (Henry Cromwell), "who strutted 
in the House in his new finery next day, to the great 
satisfaction and delight of some, and trouble of others." 
Parliaments are easily electrified by small incidents, 
and men felt that a new chapter was about to open. 
It was evident that Cromwell, who had only a few days 
before so strongly defended the major-generals, was 
now for sailing on a fresh tack. 

About this time was published the pamphlet with 
the famous title of "Killing no Murder." It sets out 
with truculent vigor the arguments for death to 
tyrants, with a direct and deadly exhortation to apply 
them to the case of the Lord Protector. The argu- 
ments had been familiar enough in the fifteenth and 
sixteenth centuries, and though the writer does not for- 
get Ehud and Eglon, Jehoiada and Athaliah, he has 
much to say from pagans like Aristotle, Tacitus, 



A CHANGE OF TACK 407 

Cicero, Machiavelli. "Had not his Highness," he 
says, "been fluent in his tears and had a supple con- 
science; and besides had to do with a people of great 
faith but little wit, his courage and the rest of his moral 
virtues, with the help of his janissaries, had never been 
able so far to advance him out of the reach of justice 
that we should have need to call for any other hand to 
remove him but that of the hangman." The Royalists 
did not conceal their approval of this doctrine of dagger 
and pistol. It is a most excellent treatise, says Nicho- 
las, the king's secretary of state. Cromwell, they said, 
had no more right to law than a wolf or a fox ; and the 
exiles found comfort in telling one another that the 
Protector went about in as much fright as Cain after he 
had murdered Abel. Three weeks before this pungent 
incitement began to circulate, its author had almost 
succeeded in a design that would have made pamphlets 
superfluous. Sexby, whom Cromwell had described 
at the opening of the new Parliament as a wretched 
creature, an apostate from all honor and honesty, one 
of the republicans whom Oliver's later proceedings 
had turned into a relentless enemy, was deep in plots 
with Royalists abroad and even with the Spaniards 
against the life of the Protector. Diligent watch was 
kept upon Sexby, and for long his foreign employers 
got nothing for their money. At length he secured 
a confederate as determined as himself and less well 
known to Thurloe's police in Miles Sindercombe, an 
old trooper of Monk's, and a hater of tyrants rather 
after Roman than Hebrew example. Sindercombe 
dogged the Protector with a pistol in his pocket, took 
a lodging in the road between Whitehall and Hampton 
Court, where Oliver passed every week, offered bribes 
to the guards, and at last his pertinacity came very near 
to success in a plan for setting fire to the Protector's 



4o8 OLIVER CROMWELL 

apartments in Whitehall. He was arrested, brought 
before a jury — a substantial body of men, most of 
them justices of the peace — and was condemned. He 
died in his bed in the Tower the night before the exe- 
cution. Sexby said that the governor had smothered 
him, but he afterward admitted that this was a fab- 
rication. The evidence went to show that some 
mineral poison had been secretly conveyed to Sinder- 
combe by three women who had been allowed to visit 
him. 

This dangerous plot was exploded in January 
(1657), and the Protector's narrow escape made a 
profound impression on the public mind. It awoke 
sober men, who are a majority in most countries when 
opportunity gives them a chance, to the fact that only 
Oliver's life stood between them and either anarchy on 
the one hand, or a vindictive restoration on the other. 
Another design of the same sort came to light not long 
after. An obscure design of a few score of the extreme 
Fifth Monarchy men was discovered in the east of Lon- 
don in the month of April. Venner, a cooper, was the 
leading spirit ; his confederates were of mean station, 
and they appear to have had the same organization of 
circles and centers that marks the more squalid of mod- 
ern secret societies. They had no coherent political 
ideas, but they spoke desperate things about the mur- 
der of the Protector, and Thurloe, with the natural 
instinct of the head of a criminal investigation depart- 
ment, was persuaded that stronger hands and heads 
were in the plot, and thought of Harrison, Rich, and 
Okey. The government had long known all about it, 
and at the proper moment laid its hand upon the 
plotters. The opponents of the alterations in the gov- 
ernment professed to think that these alterations were 
the source of the conspiracy, and tried to make a little 




Drawn by George T. Tobin from the original portrait by 
Sir Peter Lely at Swarthmore College. 

GEORGE FOX. 



A CHANGE OF TACK 409 

political capital out of the discontent which it was sup- 
posed to indicate in the honest party. The truth is, 
says the sage Thurloe, there is a sort of men who will 
never rest so long as they see troubled waters, and sup- 
pose a chance of carrying out their foolish principles. 
Venner's plot was not of much more serious conse- 
quence than the plot against Charles II, for which the 
same Venner was hanged four years later, but it now 
heightened the general excitement. 

The confusion of the sects may have involved less 
direct political peril than some of the government sup- 
posed, but it marked a social chaos without a parallel. 
Oliver was denounced as the Serpent, the Beast, the 
Bastard of Ashdod. The Saints, on the other hand, 
were engaged on Life and Death to stand or fall with 
the Lord Jesus, their captain-general on his red horse, 
against the Beast's government. Cromwell was in- 
finitely patient and even sympathetic with the most 
fantical of them. He could not bear to cjuarrel with 
the brave and open-hearted Harrison. He sent for 
him to Whitehall, gave him a handsome feast, and then 
discharged the duty of a friend by admonishing him 
to quit deceitful and slippery ways. Like the sensible 
statesman that he was, he always liked to carry as 
many of his old friends with him as he could, only if 
they would not go with him, then he went on alone. 

It was in 1654 that the Quakers entered into history. 
It was indeed high time, for the worst of Puritanism 
was that in so many of its phases it dropped out the 
Sermon on the Mount, and left the best texts in the 
New Testament to Arianising heretics. Militant 
Puritanism was often only half Christian. Quaker 
ism has undergone many developments, but in all of 
them it has been the most devout of all endeavors to 
turn Christianity into the religion of Christ. In un- 



4IO OLIVER CROMWELL 

couth phrases but with glowing souls they carried to 
its furthest point the protest against outer form and 
ceremonial as degrading to the life of the spirit. 
They fell in with the corresponding principle of an- 
tagonism to powers and institutions as hindrances to 
human freedom. No other sect so alarmed and ex- 
asperated the authorities for much the same military 
and political reasons as had made statesmen persecute 
the Christian professors in the early days of imperial 
Rome. Cromwell treated them as kindly as he could. 
He listened in his chamber at Whitehall with atten- 
tion and emotion to one of George Fox's exhortations, 
saying, "That is very good," or "That is true," and 
when they parted Cromwell said to him, "Come again 
to my house ; if thou and I were but an hour of the day 
together, we should be nearer one to the other. I wish 
no more harm to thee than I do to my own soul." 
When Fox lay in prison, a friend went to Cromwell 
and begged to be allowed to suffer in his stead. The 
Protector answered that it was contrary to the law. 
and turning to his council, "Which of you," quoth he, 
"would do as much for me if I were in the same con- 
dition ?" 

Notwithstanding his own good will the Quakers 
suffered much bitter usage from country justices, from 
judges, and from military officers. The Friends com- 
plained that justices delighted in tendering to them 
the oath of abjuration, knowing that they could not 
take it, and so designing to make a spoil of them. "It 
was never intended for them," cried Oliver, "I never 
so intended it." When they were harshly punished 
for refusing to pay their tithe, Oliver disclaimed all 
share in such severities, and assured them that all per- 
secution and cruelty was against his mind. Thurloe, 
on the other hand, who represented that secular spirit 



A CHANGE OF TACK 411 

which is so apt to be the counterfeit of statesmanship, 
saw in the Quakers foes of civil government, and re- 
garded them as the most serious enemies they had. 
The chapter of Quaker persecution must be considered 
a dark blot on the administration of the Protectorate. 

A curious interview is recorded (1654) between the 
Protector and some of his angry critics. John Rogers 
had denounced him from the pulpit, and written 
pamphlets lamenting over Oliver, Lord Cromwell, from 
that most useful of all texts, the everlasting Mcne, 
Mene,TekelUpharsiii ; and for these and other proceed- 
ings he was arrested. Cromwell admitted Rogers and 
a crowd of followers to an audience. Before they 
reached him they were struck, hustled, and abused as 
a pack of cursed dogs and damned rogues by the guards 
down-stairs. When they came to the presence, "The 
Great Man had with him two gentlemen more, who 
stood by the fire-side, and a pistol lay prepared at the 
window where he himself at first was. Then he came 
to the fire-side in great majesty, without moving or 
showing the least civility of a man, though all stood 
bare to him and gave respect." Cromwell listened 
to them with rough good-nature, trying with homely 
banter to bring them to the point. "I believe you speak 
many things according to the Gospel, but what you 
suffer for is railing and evil doing," and so forth, like 
a good-humored police magistrate trying to bring 
street preachers to reason for blocking the thorough- 
fare. 

Even with Anglicanism, he was, in spite of the 
ordinance of 1656, for fair play. A deputation of Lon- 
don ministers waited upon the Protector and com- 
plained that the Episcopal clergy got thei^" congrega- 
tions away from them. "Have they so," said Oliver, 
making as if he would say something to the captain of 



412 OLIVER CROMWELL 

the guard. "But hold." said he. "after what manner 
do the Cavaliers debauch your people?" "By preach- 
ing," said the ministers. "Then preach back again," 
said Oliver, and so left them to their reflections. Yet 
Cromwell's tolerance did not prevent a major-general 
from sending the harmless and virtuous Jeremy Tay- 
lor arbitrarily to prison. 

Cromwell's importance in church history has been 
said to rest on this, that he brought Anabaptism or 
enthusiasm, one of the marked epochs of that history, 
to its close. "In him, its greatest leader, Anabaptism 
reaches its climax, and yet it is by his action that Ana- 
baptism ceases to be a historic force. Henceforth it 
loses the universal significance that it has possessed 
for two centuries. Its political, like its general re- 
forming influence, is at an end. and its religious in- 
spirations close." ^ When Mazarin (1656) pressed 
for the same toleration for Catholics in England as 
was asked for Protestants abroad, the Protector replied 
that he believed Mazarin had less reason to complain 
of rigor on men's consciences under him than under 
the Parliament. "And herein it is my purpose as soon as 
I can remove impediments to make a further progress," 
but "I may not (shall I tell you I cannot) at this 
juncture of time answer your call for toleration ; I say 
I cannot, as to a public declaration of my sense on that 
point." As constable of the parish Cromwell's power 
was only limited by the council of ofiicers, but national 
leadership in the field of opinion he did not possess. 
In 1655 a retrograde proclamation was issued for the 
execution of the laws against Jesuits and priests, and 
for the conviction of popish recusants. Sensible men 
like Whitelocke protested that it was not needed, and 
little came of it. In 1651 Peter Wright, a priest, was 

1 Weingarten, p. 158. 



A CHANGE OF TACK 413 

hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn, along with 
a group of ordinary criminals, for seducing the people ; 
and in 1654 another priest, John South worth, an old 
man of seventy-two, suffered the same fate for the 
same offense. In 1657 the Independents, whose politi- 
cal existence had begun with their protest for tolera- 
tion, passed an act by which anybody over sixteen sus- 
pected of being a Papist might be called upon to abjure 
the leading articles of Catholic belief, and if he failed 
to purge himself should forfeit two thirds of his prop- 
erty. From this flagitious law the Protector did not 
withhold his assent. It was one of the last legislative 
performances of the Cromwellian Parliament. 

The Jews had been banished by law from England 
since the end of the thirteenth century, yet it is pretty 
certain that their presence was not entirely unknown 
in either country or town. Shakspere and Marlowe 
had made dark figures of them on the stage, though 
Shakspere' s glorious humanity had put into the mouth 
of Shylock one of the most pathetic appeals in litera- 
ture against the cruelty of theological hate. Puritanism 
itself was impregnated with ideas, language, argument, 
and history, all borrowed from Jewish antiquity and 
sacred books. Roger \\^illiams, most unswerving of 
the advocates of toleration, argued strongly for break- 
ing down the wall of superstition between Jew and 
Gentile. Stern men like Whalley saw reasons, both of 
religion and policy, why Jews should be admitted, for 
they would bring much wealth into the State, and they 
would be all the more likely to be converted. Crom- 
well with great earnestness held the same view, but 
though the question was debated candidly and without 
heat, opinion in his council was divided. In the end 
all that he felt himself able to do was to grant a certain 
number of private dispensations to individuals, and to 



414 OLIVER CROMWELL 

connive at a small synagogue and a cemetery. It was 
enough to show him on the side of freedom, pity, and 
light. But the tolerance of the Puritanism around 
him was still strictly limited. It would be graceless 
indeed to underestimate or forget the debt we owe to 
both Quakers and Independents ; they it was who at a 
critical time made liberty of conscience a broad, an 
actual, and a fighting issue. Yet it was from the 
rising spirit of rationalism, and neither from the liberal 
Anglicans like Taylor nor from the liberal Puritans 
like Cromwell and Milton, that the central stream of 
toleration flowed, with strength enough in time to miti- 
gate law and pervade the national mind. 



CHAPTER VI 



KINGSHIP 



HE entered the sanctuary," says Cardinal de Retz 
of a French poHtician, ''he Hfted the veil that 
should always cover everything that can be said or can 
be believed, as to the right of peoples and the right of 
kings — rights that never agree so well together as in 
unbroken silence.'' This was the root of the difficul- 
ties that for nine years baffled the energy of Cromwell. 
The old monarchy had a mystic as well as a historical 
foundation. The soldier's monarchy, though Crom- 
well believed it to rest upon the direct will of heaven, 
yet could only be established on positive and practical 
foundations, and these must of necessity be laid in face 
of jealous discussion, without the curtain of convention 
to screen the builders. 

Meanwhile a new and striking scene was opening. 
The breakdown of military rule, consternation caused 
by plot upon plot, the fact that four years of dictator- 
ship had brought settlement no nearer, all gave an irre- 
sistible impetus to the desire to try fresh paths. Sir 
Christopher Packe, an active and influential representa- 
tive of the city of London and once Lord Mayor, star- 
tled the House one day (February 2-^, 1657) by asking 
leave to bring forward a proposal for a new govern- 
ment, in which the chief magistrate was to take upon 
himself the title of king, and the Parliament was to 

415 



4i6 OLIVER CROMWELL 

consist of two Houses. Violent controversy immedi- 
ately broke out, and Packfe was even hustled to the 
bar to answer for his boldness. The storm quickly 
died down ; he had only precipitated a move for which 
the mind of the House was ready; leave was given 
to read his paper; and the Humble Petition and Ad- 
vice, as that paper came in time to be called, absorbed 
the whole attention of the public for four months to 
come. 

That Cromwell should have had no share in such a 
step as this may seem incredible in view^ of the im- 
mense power in his hands and of his supreme command 
over popular imagination. Yet the whole proceeding 
was obviously a censure of some of his most decisive 
acts. He had applauded the Listrument of Govern- 
ment that had made him Protector. The Instrument 
was now to be remodeled, if not overthrown. He had 
broken the first Parliament of the Protectorate for 
wasting its tmie on constitutional reform; yet consti- 
tutional reform was the very task that his second Par- 
liament was now setting about more earnestly than 
ever. He had tried government by major-generals, 
and exacted taxes for which no sanction was given by 
law^ That system was swept away, and in the new 
project a clause was passed against taxation without 
consent of Parliament, stringent enough to satisfy the 
sternest of popular reformers. Only six months ago 
he had shut the doors of the House against a hundred 
duly elected members ; and in the previous Parliament 
he had in the same way insisted that no member should 
sit who had not signed a recognition of his own au- 
thority. All these high-handed acts were now for- 
mally stamped as wrong. It Avas laid dow^n that 
persons legally chosen by free election could only be 
excluded from Parliament by judgment and consent 



KINGSHIP 417 

of that House whereof they were members. The sub- 
stitution of the title of king for protector was there- 
fore the least part of the matter. The real question 
that must have weighed upon Cromwell was whether 
the greater title did not carry with it lessened power; 
whether, although his style and dignity were undoubt- 
edly exalted, the exaltation in substance was not rather 
that of the Parliament. Assent to a change in name 
and form Avas at bottom a revolution in policy, and in 
this revolution, with all that it involved, Cromwell 
slowly, ponderously, and after long periods of doubt 
and misgivings decided to acquiesce. Yet the change 
of title was a momentous thing in itself, in the eyes 
alike of those who sought it and those who resisted. 
The strongest advocates of the kingship were the law- 
yers, that powerful profession of which historians and 
politicians do not always recognize the permeating 
influence even through the motions of revolutionary 
politics. The lawyers argued for a king, and their 
points were cogent. The office of a king, they said, 
is interwoven with the whole body of the law and the 
whole working of national institutions. The pre- 
rogatives of a king with all their limits and dimensions 
are well understood, but who can define the rights or 
the duties of a protector ? The people, again, only love 
what they know; and what they know is the crown, 
the ancient symbol of order, unity, and rule. These 
were sound arguments, appealing to Cromwell's con- 
servative instincts. The only argument by which he 
could have refuted them was a demonstration that 
the Protectorate had brought a settlement, and this was 
just what the Protectorate had as yet notoriously failed 
to do. It is impossible not to believe that in this crisis 
of things Cromwell had convinced himself that the 
lawyers were right. 
27 



41 8 OLIVER CROMWELL 

From the balance of argument he turned, as states- 
men must or should, to the balance of forces; to that 
formidable host of armed men whom he had welded 
into the most powerful military instrument in Europe, 
whom he had led to one victory after another in nine 
years of toil and peril, whom he had followed rather 
than led in all the successive stages of their revolution- 
ary fervor, whose enthusiasms were the breath of his 
nostrils. How would these stern warriors view the 
sight of their chief putting on the mantle of that hated 
office and title which they had been taught to regard 
as the ensigns of bondage, and against which the Lord 
of Hosts had borne such crushing witness. Well 
might Oliver say that he had lived all the latter part 
of his life in the fire, in the midst of troubles, and that 
all the things together that had befallen him since he 
was first engaged in the affairs of the Commonwealth 
could not so move his heart and spirit as did this 
proposal. 

With angry promptness the officers showed their 
teeth. Lambert and others of the military leaders 
instantly declared against the new design. Within 
three days of Packe's announcement a hundred of 
them waited on the Protector and besought him not 
to listen to the proffer of the crown. It would dis- 
please the army, and the godly ; it would be a danger 
to the nation and to his own person ; it would one day 
bring back the exiled line. Cromwell dealt very faith- 
fully with them in reply. He liked the title as little 
as they liked it, a mere feather in a hat, a toy for a 
child. But had they not themselves proposed it in 
the Instrument? Here he glanced at Lambert, for- 
merly the main author of such a proposal in 1653, and 
now in 1657 the main instigator of opposition. Crom- 
well continued in the same vein of enersfetic remon- 



KINGSHIP 419 

strance, like a man wearied, as he said, of being on all 
occasions made a drudge. Strangely does he light up 
the past. His reply was a double arraignment of him- 
self and of them for the most important things that 
most of them had done. He said it was they who had 
made him dissolve the Long Parliament. It was they 
who had named the convention that followed, which 
went to such fantastic lengths that nobody could be 
sure of calling anything his own. It was they who 
had pressed him to starve out the ministers of religion. 
Was it not they too who must needs dissolve the Par- 
liament in 1655 for trying to mend the Instrument, as 
if the Instrument did not need to be mended? They 
had thought it necessary to have major-generals, and 
the major-generals did their part well. Then after 
that, nothing would content them till a Parliament was 
called. He gave his vote against it, but they were con- 
fident that somehow they would get men chosen to 
their heart's desire. How they had failed therein, and 
how much the country had been disobliged, was only 
too well known. Among other things, this string of 
reproaches helps to explain the curious remark of 
Henry Cromwell while walking in the garden of Lud- 
low's country house at Monkstown in Dublin Bay. 
"You that are here," he said, "may think that my 
father has power, but they make a very kickshaw of 
him at London." 

Oliver's rebuke made the impression that he had cal- 
culated. Time was gained, and a compromise agreed 
to. The question of the kingly title was postponed 
until the end of the bill, and the rest of its proposals 
went forward in order. On any view this delay on 
Cromwell's part was a piece of sound tactics. Those 
who would not have valued the other reforms without 
a king as keystone of the reconstructed arch, assented 



420 OLIVER CROMWELL 

to the reforms in the hope that kingship would follow. 
Those who hated the kingship, pressed for enlargement 
of the constitution with the hope that the question of 
the crown would drop. When the clause was at last 
reached (March 25), the title of king was carried by 
one hundred and twenty-three to sixty-two. Opera- 
tions in the House were completed by the end of March, 
and on the last day of the month ( 1657) the new con- 
stitution engrossed on vellum was submitted to the 
Protector at Whitehall. He replied in a tone of dig- 
nity not without pathos, that it was the greatest weight 
of anything that was ever laid upon a man; that he 
might perhaps be at the end of his work; that were he 
to make a mistake in judgment here, it were better that 
he had never been born ! and that he must take time 
for the utmost deliberaton and consideration. Then 
began a series of parleys and conferences that lasted 
for the whole of the month of April, with endless du- 
bitances, postponements, and adjournments, iteration 
and reiteration of arguments. Cromwell's speeches 
were found "dark and promiscuous," nor can a modern 
reader wonder; and he undoubtedly showed extraor- 
dinary readiness in keeping off the point and balking 
the eager interlocutor. One passage (April 13) is 
famous. He told them that he had undertaken his 
position originally not so much out of a hope of doing 
any good, as from a desire to prevent mischief and evil. 
"For truly I have often thought that I could not tell 
what my business was, nor what I was in the place I 
stood in, save comparing myself to a good constable 
set to keep the peace of the parish." That, he said, 
had been his content and satisfaction in all the troubles 
he had undergone, that they still had peace. Nobody 
any longer doubts that this homely image was the 
whole truth. The question was whether the con- 




From the original portrait in possession of Miss Disbrowe. 
SAMUEL DESBOROUGH. 



KINGSHIP 421 

stable's truncheon should now be struck from his hand, 
or more boldly grasped. Time after time they parted, 
in the words of Clarendon, "all men standing at gaze 
and in terrible suspense according to their several hopes 
and fears, till they knew what he would determine. 
All the dispute was now within his own chamber, and 
there is no question that the man was in great agony, 
and in his own mind he did heartily desire to be king, 
and thought it the only way to be safe." 

The feeling of his friends may be gathered from 
Henry Cromwell, then in Ireland. "I look on some 
of them," he said, speaking of the "contrariant" offi- 
cers, as "vainly arrogating to themselves too great a 
share in his Highness' government, and to have too 
big an opinion of their own merit in subverting the 
old." He thinks the gaudy feather in the hat of au- 
thority a matter of little concern either way. If the 
army men were foolish in resenting it with so much 
heat, the heat of those who insisted on it was foolish 
too. Whether the gaudy feather decked the hat or 
not, anything would be better than the loss of the 
scheme as a whole; the scheme was good in itself, and 
its loss would puff up the contrariants and make it 
easier for them, still remaining in power as they would 
remain, to have their own way. It is plain that the 
present dissension on the kingship was an explosion of 
griefs and jealousies that were not new. 

At last Cromwell declared to several members that 
he was resolved to accept. Lambert, Desborough, and 
Fleetwood warned him that if he did, they must with- 
draw from all public employment, and that other offi- 
cers of quality would certainly go with them. Desbor- 
ough, happening after he knew the momentous decision 
to meet Colonel Pride, told him that Cromwell had 
made up his mind to accept the crown. "That he shall 



422 OLIVER CROMWELL 

not," said the unfaltering Pride. "Why," asked the 
other, "how wilt thou hinder it?" "Get me a petition 
drawn," answered Pride, "and I will prevent it." The 
petition was drawn, and on the day when the House 
was expecting Oliver's assent, a group of seven-and- 
twenty officers appeared at the bar with the prayer 
that they should not press the kingship any further. 
Pride's confidence in the effect of a remonstrance from 
the officers was justified by the event. When news of 
this daring move against both the determination of the 
Protector, and the strong feeling of the Parliament, 
reached Whitehall, Cromwell was reported as ex- 
tremely angry, calling it a high breach of privilege, 
and the greatest injury they could have offered him 
short of cutting his throat. He sent for Fleetwood, 
reproached him for allowing things to go so far, while 
knowing so well that without the assent of the army 
he was decided against the kingship ; and bade him go 
immediately to Westminster to stay further proceed- 
ings on the petition, and instantly invite the House to 
come to \\niitehall to hear his definite reply. They 
came. He gave his decision in a short, firm speech, 
to the effect that if he accepted the kingship, at the 
best he should do it doubtingly, and assuredly what- 
ever was done doubtingly was not of faith. "I can- 
not," he said, "undertake this government with the 
title of king; and that is mine answer to this great 
and weighty business." This was all he said, but 
everybody knew that he had suffered his first repulse, 
a wound in the house of his friend. He set his mark 
on those who had withstood him, and Lambert was 
speedily dismissed. It is not easy to explain why, if 
Cromwell did not fear to exile Lambert from place, 
as he had not feared to send Harrison to prison, he 
should not have held to his course in reliance on his 



KINGSHIP 423 

own authority in the army. Clarendon supposes his 
courage for once to have failed, and his genius to have 
forsaken him. Swift, in that whimsical list of Mean 
and Great Figures made by several persons in some 
particular action of their lives, counts Cromwell a 
great figure when he quelled a mutiny in Hyde Park, 
and a mean one the day when, out of fear, he refused 
the kingship. As usual Cromwell was more politic 
than the army. It is strange that some who eulogize 
him as a great conservative statesman, yet eulogize 
with equal fervor the political sagacity of the army, 
who as a matter of fact resisted almost every conserva- 
tive step that he wished to take, while they hurried 
him on to all those revolutionary steps to which he 
was most averse. However this may be, we may at 
least be sure that "few men were better judges of what 
might be achieved by daring." and that if he deter- 
mined that the occasion was not ripe, he must be 
assumed to have known what he was about. 

The House proceeded with their measure on the 
new footing, and on June 26th Oliver was solemnly in- 
stalled as Lord Protector under the new law. Though 
the royal title was in abeyance, the scene marked the 
conversion of what had first been a military dictator- 
ship, and then the Protectorate of a Republic, into a 
constitutional monarchy. A rich canopy was prepared 
at the upper end of Westminster Hall, and under it 
was placed the royal Coronation Chair of Scotland, 
which had been brought from the Abbey. On the 
table lay a magnificent Bible, and the sword and scepter 
of the Commonwealth. When the Lord Protector 
had entered, the Speaker, in the name of the Parlia- 
ment, placed upon his shoulders a mantle of purple vel- 
vet lined with ermine, girt him with the sword, de- 
livered into his hands the scepter of massy gold, and 



424 OLIVER CROMWELL 

administered the oath of fidelity to the new constitu- 
tion. A prayer was offered up, and then Cromwell, 
amid trumpet blasts and loud shouting from the peo- 
ple who thronged the hall, took his seat in the chair, 
holding the scepter in his right hand, with the am- 
bassador of Louis XIV on the one side, and the 
ambassador of the United Provinces on the other. 
"What a comely and glorious sight it is," said the 
Speaker, ''to behold a Lord Protector in a purple robe, 
with a scepter in his hand, with the sword of justice 
girt about him, and his eyes fixed upon the Bible! 
Long may you enjoy them all to your own comfort and 
the comfort of the people of these nations." Before 
many months were over, Oliver was declaring to them, 
"I can say in the presence of God, in comparison with 
whom we are but like poor creeping ants upon the 
earth, that I would have been glad to have lived under 
my woodside, to have kept a flock of sheep, rather than 
undertake such a government as this." 

The Protectorate has sometimes been treated as a 
new and original settlement of the crucial question of 
Parliamentary sovereignty. On the contrary, the his- 
tory of the Protectorate in its two phases, under the 
two Instruments of 1653 and 1657 by which it was 
constituted, seems rather to mark a progressive return 
to an old system than the creation of a new one. The 
"Agreement of the People" (1649) '^'^^s the embodi- 
ment of the idea of the absolute supremacy of a single 
elective House. The "Instrument of Government" 
(1653) went a certain way toward mitigating this 
supremacy by entrusting executive power to a single 
person, subject to the assent and cooperation of a coun- 
cil itself the creation, at first direct and afterward in- 
Vflirect, of the single House. The "Humble Petition 
Advice" (1657) in effect restored the principle of 



KINGSHIP 425 

monarchy, and took away from Parliament the right in 
future to choose the monarch. The oath prescribed 
for a privy council was an oath of allegiance to the per- 
son and authority of the Lord Protector and his suc- 
cessors, and he was clothed with the more than regal 
right of deciding who the successor should be. On 
him was conferred the further power of naming the 
members of the new Second House. On the other 
hand, the council or cabinet by whose advice the 
Lord Protector was bound to govern, was to be ap- 
proved by both Houses, and to be irremovable without 
the consent of Parliament. The Protectorate then was 
finally established, so far as constitutional documents 
go and in rudimentary forms, on the same principles 
of Parliamentary supremacy over the executive and of 
ministerial responsibility that have developed our mod- 
ern system of government by Parliamentary cabinet. 



CHAPTER VII 



PERSONAL TRAITS 



THERE is no sign that the wonderful fortunes that 
had befallen him in the seventeen years since 
he quitted his woodside, his fields and flocks, had 
altered the soundness of Cromwell's nature. Large af- 
fairs had made his vision broader ; power had hardened 
his grasp; manifold necessities of men and things had 
taught him lessons of reserve, compliance, suppleness, 
and silence; great station brought out new dignity of 
carriage. But the foundations were unchanged. Time 
never choked the springs of warm afifection in him, the 
true refreshment of every careworn life. In his family 
he was as tender and as solicitous in the hour of his 
glory as he had been in the distant days at St. Ives and 
Ely. It was in the spring of 1654 that he took up his 
residence at \\'hitehall. "His wife seemed at first un- 
willing to remove thither, tho' she afterward became 
better satisfied with her grandeur. His mother, who 
by reason of her great age was not so easily flattered 
with these temptations, very much mistrusted the issue 
of affairs, and would be often afraid, when she heard 
the noise of a musket, that her son was shot, being 
exceedingly dissatisfied unless she might see him once 
a day at least." Only six months after her installation 
in the splendors of Whitehall the aged woman passed 

426 



PERSONAL TRAITS 427 

away. "My Lord Protector's mother," writes Thurloe 
in November, "of ninety-four years old, died the last 
night, and a little before her death gave my lord her 
blessing in these words : 'The Lord cause his face to 
shine upon you, and comfort ye in all your adversities, 
and enable 3^ou to do great things for the glory of your 
most high God, and to be a relief unto his people ; my 
dear son, I leave my heart with thee; a good-night.' " 
His letters to his wife tell their own tale of fond 
importunity and affectionate response: 

'I have not leisure to write much,' he says to her from 
Dunbar. ' But I could chide thee that in many of thy letters 
thou writest to me, that I should not be unmindful of thee and 
thy little ones. Truly if I love you not too well, I think I err 
not on the other hand much. Thou art dearer to me than 
any creature, let that suffice.' 



And then he told her, as we have seen, that he was 
growing an old man and felt the infirmities of age 
marvelously stealing upon him. He was little more 
than fifty, and their union had lasted thirty years. 
Seven months later he writes to her that he is increased 
in strength in his outward man : 

But that will not satisfy me, except I get a heart to love 
and serve my heavenly Father better. . . . Pray for me; truly 
I do daily for thee and the dear family, and God Almighty 
bless ye all with his spiritual blessings. . . . My love to the 
dear little ones ; I pray for grace for them. I thank them for 
their letters: let me have them often. ... If Dick Cromwell 
and his wife be with you, my dear love to them. I pray for 
them; they shall, God wilhng, hear from me. I love them 
very dearly. Truly I am not able as yet to write much. I 
am weary, and rest, ever thine. 



428 OLIVER CROMWELL 

He was ever, says Thurloe, a most indulgent and 
tender father. Richard Cromwell, as history well 
knows, had little share of the mastering energies that 
made his father "chief of men." With none but re- 
spectable qualities, with a taste for hawking, hunting, 
and horse-racing, he lacked strenuous purpose, taking 
life as it came, not shaping it. When the time arrived 
for his son's marriage, Cromwell, though plunged 
deep in public anxieties, did his share about the choice 
of a wise connection, about money, about the life of 
the young couple, with prudent care. Henry Crom- 
well, an active soldier, an administrator of conspicuous 
judgment and tact, and a politician with sense and 
acuteness, had been commander-in-chief in Ireland 
since 1655, and his father thought well enough of him 
in 1657, though still hardly thirty, to make him lord- 
deputy in succession to Fleetwood. Five years before, 
Fleetwood had married Bridget Cromwell, widow of 
the brave and keen-witted Ireton. Elizabeth, said to 
have been Oliver's favorite daughter, was married to 
Claypole, a Northamptonshire gentleman, of respect- 
able family and estate. These two were staying at the 
Cockpit in Whitehall in 165 1. "Mind poor Betty of 
the Lord's great mercy," writes Cromwell to her 
mother. "Oh, I desire her not only to seek the Lord 
in her necessity, but in deed and in truth to turn to the 
Lord; and to take heed to a departing heart, and of 
being cozened with worldly vanities and worldly com- 
pany, which I doubt she is too subject to. I earnestly 
and frequently pray for her and for him. Truly they 
are dear to me, very dear ; and I am in fear lest Satan 
should deceive them — knowing how weak our hearts 
are, and how subtle the Adversary is, and what way 
the deceitfulness of our hearts and the vain world make 
for his temptations." 




















From the original portrait at Chequers Court, by permission 
of Mrs. Frankland-Russell-Astley. 

ELIZABETH CROMWELL, DAUGHTER OF SIR THOMAS STEWARD 

OF ELY, WIFE OF ROBERT CROMWELL, AND 

MOTHER OF OLIVER CROMWELL. 











PERSONAL TRAITS 429 

Not long after the establishment of the second Pro- 
tectorate, the youngest daughters made matches which 
were taken by jealous onlookers to be still further signs 
of the growth of Cromwell's reactionary ambition. 
Lady Mary, now one-and-twenty, married Lord Fau- 
conberg, and Lady Frances in the same week married 
Robert Rich, grandson and heir of the Earl of War- 
wick. Swift tells Stella how he met Lady Faucon- 
berg at a christening in 17 10, two years before her 
death. He thought her extremely like her father's 
pictures. 

The Protector delighted in music, was fond of 
hawking, hunting, coursing, liked a game of bowls, 
and took more than a sportsman's pleasure in fine 
horses. There is little evidence that he was other than 
indifferent to profane letters, but as Chancellor of the 
University of Oxford he encouraged the religious 
studies of the place, helped in the production of Wal- 
ton's polyglot bible, and set up a college at Durham. 
Cromwell had compass of mind enough to realise the 
duty of a state to learning, but the promotion of reli- 
gion was always his commanding interest. 

Precisians found the court at Whitehall frivolous 
and lax, but what the}' called frivolity was nothing 
worse than the venial sin of cheerfulness. One of the 
Dutch ambassadors in 1654 describes what life at court 
was like on occasions of state, and the picture is worth 
reproducing : 

The Master of the Ceremonies came to fetch us in two 
coaches of His Highness about half an hour past one, and 
brought us to Whitehall, where twelve trumpeters were ready, 
sounding against our coming. My lady Nieuport and my 
wife were brought to His Highness presently . . . who re- 
ceived us with great demonstration of amity. After we staid a 



430 OLIVER CROMWELL 

little, we were conducted into another room, where we found 
a table ready covered. His Highness sat on one side of it 
alone; my lord B., N., and myself at the upper end, and 
Lord President Lawrence and others next to us. There 
was in the same room another table covered for other 
lords of the council and others. At the table of my Lady 
Protectrice dined my lady N., my wife, my lady Lambert, 
my lord Protector's daughter, and mine. The music played 
all the while we were at dinner. The Lord Protector [then] 
had us into another room, where the lady Protectrice and 
others came to us: where we had also music, and wine, and a 
psalm sung which His Highness gave us, and told us it was 
yet the best paper that had been exchanged between us ; and 
from thence we were had into a gallery, next the river, where 
we walked with His Highness about half an hour, and then 
took our leaves, and were conducted back again to our houses, 
after the same manner as we were brought. 

Baxter tells a less genial story. Cromwell, after 
hearing him preach, sent for him. The great divine 
found him with Broghill, Lambert, and Thurloe. 
Cromwell "began a long and tedious speech of God's 
providence in the change of government, and how God 
had owned it, and what great things had been done at 
home and abroad in Spain and Holland." Lambert 
fell asleep. Baxter attacked the change of govern- 
ment, and Cromwell with some passion defended it. 
"A few days after, he sent for me again to hear my 
judgment about liberty of conscience, which he pre- 
tended to be most zealous for, before almost all his 
privy council ; where, after another slow tedious speech 
of his, I told him a little of my judgment. And when 
two of his company had spun out a great deal more of 
the time in such-like tedious, but more ignorant 
speeches, some four or five hours being spent, I told 
him that if he w^ould be at the labor to read it, I could 




From the portrait at Chequers Court, by permission of Mrs. Frankland-Russell-Astley. 
JOHN CLAYPOLE. 



PERSONAL TRAITS 431 

tell him more of my mind in writing in two sheets, than 
in that wa}' of speaking in many days." And this in 
truth we may well believe. It was the age of long dis- 
course and ecstatic exercises. John Howe, who had 
first attracted Cromwell by preaching for two hours, 
and then turning the hour-glass for a third, has told us 
that on a Sunday or a fast-day he began about nine in 
the morning A\ith a prayer for about quarter of an 
hour, in which he begged a blessing on the work of the 
day, and afterward expounded a chapter for about three 
quarters; then prayed for an hour, preached for an- 
other hour, and prayed for half an hour: then he re- 
tired to refresh himself for quarter of an hour or more, 
the people singing all the while, and then came again 
into the pulpit, and prayed for another hour, and gave 
them another sermon of about an hour's length ; and 
then concluded toward four o'clock with a final half 
hour of prayer. 

Cromwell had that mark of greatness in a ruler that 
he was well served. No prince had ever abler or 
more faithful agents in arms, diplomacy, administra- 
tion. Blake, Monk, Lockhart, Thurloe are conspicu- 
ous names in a list that might easily be made longer. 
Familiars Cromwell had none. The sage and in- 
defatigable Thurloe, who more closely than any of the 
others resembled the deep-browed counselors that 
stood around the throne of Elizabeth, came nearest to 
the heart of the Protector's deliberations. Thurloe 
tells us ot himself that he always distrusted his own 
counsels, when they sprang from moments of despond- 
ency — an implication that wisdom goes with cheerful- 
ness, of which Cromwell was most likely the inspirer. 
The extent and manner of his resort to advice is no 
small measure of the fitness of a man for large affairs. 
Oliver was not of the evil Napoleonic build. He was 



432 OLIVER CROMWELL 

liable to bursts of passion, he had his moods, he was un- 
wisely and fatally impatient of Parliamentary discus- 
sion ; but nobody knew better the value of consultation 
in good faith, of serious conference among men sin- 
cerely bent on common aims, of the arts of honest per- 
suasion as distinguished from cajolery. Of that pettish 
egotism which regards a step taken on advice as humili- 
ation, he had not a trace ; he was a man. There are no 
signs that he ever had, what even strong men have not 
always been without, a taste for sycophants. White- 
locke has described how upon great 1)usinesses the Pro- 
tector was wont to advise with himself, Thurloe, and 
a few others; how he would shut himself up with them 
for three or four hours together, "would sometimes be 
very cheerful, and laying aside his greatness would be 
exceedingly familiar, and by way of diversion would 
make verses with them, and every one must try his 
fancy. He commonly called for tobacco, pipes, and a 
candle, and would now and then take tobacco himself; 
then he would fall again to his serious and great busi- 
ness." This did not prevent persons around him from 
knowing that whatever resolutions His Highness took 
would be his own. Chatham inveighing against Lord 
North in 1770, charged him with being without that 
sagacity which is the true source of information — 
sagacity to compare causes and effects, to judge of the 
present state of things, and to discern the future by 
a careful review of the past. "Oliver Cromwell, who 
astonished mankind by his intelligence," he proceeds, 
"did not derive it from spies in the cabinet of every 
prince in Europe ; he drew it from the cabinet of his 
own sagacious mind." Yet there is a passage in a letter 
from Thurloe to Henry Cromwell not many weeks 
before the end, where that faithful servant regrets his 
master's too ready compliance. "His Highness finding 



PERSONAL TRAITS 433 

he can have no advice from those he most expected it 
from, saith he will take his own resolutions, and that 
he cannot any longer satisfy himself to sit still, and 
make himself guilty of the loss of all the honest party; 
and truly I have long wished that His Highness would 
proceed according to his own satisfaction, and not so 
much consider others." 



28 



CHAPTER VIII 



FOREIGN POLICY 



(w 



E have all learned that no inconsiderable part of 
history is a record of the illusions of statesmen^ 
^Was Cromwell's foreign policy one of them ? To the 
prior question what his foreign policy was, no single 
comprehensive answer can be given. It was mixed; 
defensive and aggressive, pacific and warlike ; zeal for 
religion and zeal for trade; pride of empire and a 
steadfast resistance to a restoration of the royal line 
by foreign action. Like every other great ruler in 
intricate times and in a situation without a precedent, 
he was compelled to change alliances, weave fresh com- 
binations, abandon to-day the ardent conception of 
yesterday. His grand professed object was indeed 
fixed ; the unity of the Protestant interest in Christen- 
dom, with England in the van. Characteristically 
Cromwell had settled this in his mind by impulse and 
the indwelling light. It proved to be an object that 
did not happen to fit in with the nature of things. 
Unluckily, in the shoals and shifting channels of inter- 
national affairs, the indwelling light is but a treacher- 
ous beacon. So far as purely national aims were con- 
cerned, Cromwell's external policy was in its broad 
features the policy of the Commonwealth before him.^ 

1 See above iv, chap. 5. 

434 



FOREIQN POLICY 435 

What went beyond purely national aims and was in a 
sense his own, however imposing, was of questionable 
service either to the State or to the Cause. 

At the outset his policy was peace. The Common- 
wealth had gone to war with the Dutch, and Crom- 
well's first use of his new power was to bring the con- 
flict to an end (April, 1654). His first boast to his 
Parliament was that he had made treaties not only 
with Holland, but with Sweden, Denmark, and Por- 
tugal. These treaties were essentially commercial, but 
they implied general amity, which in the Dutch case 
did not go very deep. ''Peace," said Oliver, using the 
conventional formula since worn so painfully thread- 
bare on the eve of every war by men armed to the teeth, 
"peace is desirable with all men, so far as it may be had 
with conscience and honor." As time went on, designs 
shaped themselves in his mind that pointed not to peace 
but to energetic action. He went back to the maritime 
policy of the Long Parliament. Even in coming to 
terms with the Dutch in 1654 he had shown a severity 
that indicated both a strong consciousness of mastery, 
and a stiff intention to use it to the uttermost. This 
second policy was a trunk with two branches, a daring 
ideal with a double aspect, one moral, the other mate- 
rial. The Protector intended to create a Protestant as- 
cendancy in continental Europe, and to assert the rights 
and claims of English ships and English trade at sea. 
The union of all the Protestant churches had long been 
a dream of more than one pious zealot, but Cromwell 
crystallized the aspirations after spiritual communion 
into schemes of secular policy. In spirit it was not 
very unlike the Arab invaders who centuries before 
had swept into Europe, the sword in one hand and the 
Koran in the other, to conquer and to convert. If he 
had only lived, we are told, his continental policy might 



436 OLIVER CROMWELL 

have been the rudiment of something great, the foun- 
dation of a Protestant and military state that might 
have been as powerful as the Spanish monarchy at the 
beginning of the century, and might have opened for 
England an age if not of happiness, yet of vast great- 
ness and ascendancy (Seeley). There is no reason to 
think that any such sacrifice of national happiness to 
national ascendancy was ever a true account of Oliver 
or of his ideals. Those baleful policies were left for 
the next generation and Louis XIV, the solar orb now 
first diffusing its morning glow above the horizon. 
Justly has it been said (Gardiner) that if Oliver had 
been granted these twenty years more of life that en- 
thusiastic worshipers hold necessary for the success 
of his schemes, a European coalition would have been 
formed against the English Protector as surely as one 
was formed against Louis of France. 

When peace was made with the Dutch (April, 1654) 
the government found themselves with one hundred 
and sixty sail of "brave and well-appointed ships swim- 
ming at sea." The Protector and his council held 
grave debate whether they should be laid up or em- 
ployed in some advantageous design, and against which 
of the two great crowns, France or Spain, that design 
should be directed ; or whether they would not do bet- 
ter to sell their friendship to both the powers for a 
good sum of money down. Lambert opposed the pol- 
icy of aggression in the Spanish Indies. The scene, 
he said, was too far ofif; the difSculties and the cost 
had not been thought out; it would not advance the 
Protestant cause; we had far more important work 
at home — the reform of the law, the settlement of Ire- 
land, and other high concernments. Whether Lam- 
bert stood alone, or held views that were shared by 
colleagues in the council, we cannot say. Cromwell 



FOREIGN POLICY 437 

argued, on the other hand, that God had brought 
them there to consider the work that they might do 
all over the world as well as at home, and if they 
waited for a surplus they might as well put off that 
work forever. Surely the one hundred and sixty 
ships were a leading of Providence. The design would 
cost little more than laying up the ships, and there was 
a chance of immense profit. The proceedings of the 
Spaniard in working his silver mines, his shipping and 
transshipping, his startings and his stoppages, his man- 
agement of trade-winds and ocean-currents in bringing 
the annual treasure home — all these things were con- 
sidered with as much care as in the old days, a couple 
of generations ago, when Drake and Hawkins and the 
rest carried on their mighty raids against the colonial 
trade of Spain, and opened the first spacious chapter 
in the history of the maritime power of England. 
From the point of view of modern public law the pic- 
ture of the Council of State, with Oliver at the head of 
the board discussing the feasibility of seizing the West 
Indies, is like so many hearty corsairs with pistols, 
cutlasses, and boarding-caps resolving their plans in 
the cabin of the Red Rover or Paul Jones's Ranger. 
But modern public law, such as it was, did not extend 
to the Spanish Main. It is true that Spain refused to 
grant freedom from the Inquisition and free sailing 
in the West Indies, and these might have been legiti- 
mate grounds of war. But it is hard to contend that 
they were the real or the only grounds. Historians 
may differ whether the expedition to the West Indies 
was a scheme for trade, territorial aggrandizement, 
and naked plunder of Spanish silver ; or only a spirited 
Protestant demonstration in force. Carnal and spir- 
itual were strangely mingled in those times. "We that 
look to Zion," wrote a gallant Anabaptist admiral of 



438 OLIVER CROMWELL 

the age, "should hold Christian communion. We have 
all the guns aboard." Whether as substance of the 
policy or accident, plunder followed. 

To disarm the Spanish king's suspicion the Pro- 
tector wrote to assure him that the despatch of the fleet 
to the Mediterranean implied no ill intent to any ally 
or friend, "in the number of which we count your 
majesty" (August 5, 1654). If the king could have 
heard the arguments at the Council of State he might 
have thought that this amicable language hardly an- 
swered to the facts. Cromwell's earliest move in his 
new line was to despatch Blake with one strong fleet to 
the Mediterranean (October), and Penn and Venables 
(December, 1654) with another to the West Indies. 
In each case the instructions were not less explicit 
against French ships than Spanish. Blake alarmed 
France and Spain, menaced the Pope, and attacked 
the Barbary pirates. The expedition against Saint 
Domingo was a failure ; it was ill-found, ill-conceived, 
and ill-led. Before returning in disgrace the com- 
manders, hoping to retrieve their name, acquired 
the prize of Jamaica. These proceedings brought the 
Protector directly within the sphere of the great Euro- 
pean conflict of the age, and drew England into the 
heart of the new distribution of power in Europe that 
marked the middle epoch of the seventeenth century. 
From the Elizabethan times conflict on the high seas 
had ranked as general reprisal and did not constitute 
a state of war, nor did it necessarily now. The status 
of possessions over sea was still unfixed.^ Cromwell, 
however, had no right to be surprised when Philip 
chose to regard aggression in the Indies as justifying 
declaration of war in Europe. A further consequence 
was that Spain now began warmly to espouse the cause 

1 Corbet's "Spanish War," 1585-S7, viii-ix. — Navy Record Society, 1898. 



FOREIGN POLICY 439 

of the exiled line, and in the spring of 1656 Philip IV 
formally bound himself to definite measures for the 
transport of a Royalist force from Flanders to aid in 
the English Restoration. 

The power of Spain had begun to shrink with the 
abdication of Charles V. Before the middle of the 
seventeenth century Portugal had broken off; revolt 
had shaken her hold in Italy ; Catalonia was in stand- 
ing insurrection; the United Provinces had finally 
achieved their independence; by the barbarous expul- 
sion of Moors and Jews she lost three millions of the 
best of her industrial population ; her maritime suprem- 
acy was at an end. Philip IV, the Spanish sovereign 
from a little time before the accession of Charles I in 
England to a little time after the restoration of Charles 
II, was called by flatterers the Great. "Like a ditch," 
said Spanish humor — "the more you dig away from it. 
the greater the ditch." The Treaty of Westphalia 
(1648), the fruit of the toil, the foresight, and the 
genius of Richelieu, though others gathered it, weak- 
ened the power of the Germanic branch of the House 
of Hapsburg, and Mazarin, the second of the two fa- 
mous cardinals who for forty years governed France, 
was now in the crisis of his struggle with the Spanish 
branch. In this long struggle between two states, each 
torn by intestine dissension as well as by an external 
enemy, the power of England was recognized as a 
decisive factor after the rise of the republic; and be- 
fore Cromwell assumed the government Spain had 
hastened to recognize the new Commonwealth. Crom- 
well, as we have seen, long hesitated between Spain 
and France. Traditional policy pointed to France, for 
though she was predominantly Catholic, yet ever since 
the days of Francis I the greatest of her statesmen, in- 
cluding Henry IV and Richelieu, had favored the Ger- 



440 OLIVER CROMWELL 

man princes and the Protestant powers, from no special 
care for the reformed faith, but because the Protestant 
powers were the adversaries of the emperor, the head 
of the Cathohc party in Europe. 

Mazarin endeavored to gain Cromwell from the 
moment of his triumphant return from Worcester. It 
is the mark of genius to be able to satisfy new demands 
as they arise, and to play new parts with skill. Ex- 
pecting to deal with a rough soldier whom fortune and 
his sword had brought to the front, Mazarin found 
instead of this a diplomatist as wary, as supple, as 
tenacious, as dexterous, as capable of large views, as 
incapable of dejection, as he was all these things him- 
self. The rude vigor of the English demands and the 
Lord Protector's haughty pretensions never irritated 
Mazarin, of whom it has been aptly said (Mignet) 
that his ambition raised him above self-love, and that 
he was so scientifically cool that even adversaries never 
appeared to him in the light of enemies to be hated, 
but only as obstacles to be moved or turned. It was 
at one time even conjectured idly enough that Maza- 
rin designed to marry one of his nieces to the sec- 
ond son of Oliver. For years the match went on be- 
tween the Puritan chief who held the English to be 
the chosen people, and the Italian cardinal who de- 
clared that though his language was not French, his 
heart was. Mazarin's diplomacy followed the vicis- 
situdes of Cromwell's political fortune, and the pur- 
suit of an alliance waxed hotter or cooler, as the Pro- 
tector seemed likely to consolidate his power or to let 
it slip. Still both of them were at bottom men of di- 
rect common sense, and their friendship stood on nearly 
as good a basis for six or seven years as that which 
for twenty years of the next century supported the 
more fruitful friendship between Sir Robert Walpole 



FOREIGN POLICY 441 

and Cardinal Fleury. A French writer, eminent both 
as historian and actor in state affairs, says of these 
negotiations that it is the supreme art of great states- 
men to treat business simply and with frankness, when 
they know that they have to deal with rivals who will 
not let themselves be either duped or frightened 
(Guizot). The comment is just. Cromwell was 
harder and less pliant, and had nothing of the caress 
under which an Italian often hides both sense and firm- 
ness. But each was alive to the difficulties of the other, 
and neither expected short cuts nor a straight road. 
Mazarin had very early penetrated Cromwell's idea of 
making himself the guardian both of the Huguenots in 
France, and of the Protestant interest throughout 
Europe. In the spring of 1655 the massacre of the 
Protestants in the Piedmontese valleys stirred a wave 
of passion in England that still vibrates in Milton's 
sonnet, and that Cromwell's impressive energy forced 
on Europe. At no other time in his history did the 
flame in his own breast burn w4th an intenser glow. 
The incident both roused his deepest feelings and was 
a practical occasion for realizing his policy of a con- 
federation of Protestant powers, with England at the 
head of them, and France acting in concert. To be 
indifferent to such doings, he said, is a great sin, and 
a deeper sin still to be blind to them from policy or 
ambition. He associated his own personality with the 
case in a tone of almost jealous directness that struck 
a new note. It was his diplomatic pressure upon 
France that secured redress, though Mazarin, not with- 
out craft, kept for himself a foremost place. 

No English ruler has ever shown a nobler figure 
than Cromwell in the case of the Vaudois, and he had 
all the highest impulses of the nation with him. He 
said to the French ambassador that the woes of the 



442 OLIVER CROMWELL 

poor Piedmontese went as close to his heart as if they 
were his own nearest kin ; and he gave personal proof 
of the sincerity of his concern by a munificent contri- 
bution to the fund for the relief of the martyred popu- 
lation. Never was the great conception of a powerful 
state having duties along with interests more mag- 
nanimously realized. 

Now was the time when the Council of State directed 
their secretary to buy a new atlas for their use. and to 
keep the globe always standing in the council chamber. 
The Venetian representative in London in 1655 ^^~ 
clares that the court of the Protector was the most 
brilliant and most regarded in all Europe : six kings 
had sent ambassadors and solicited his friendship. The 
glory of all this in the eyes of Cromwell, like its inter- 
est in history, is the height that was thus reached 
among the ruling and established forces of Europe by 
Protestantism. The influence of France, says Ranke. 
had rescued Protestantism from destruction; it was 
through Cromwell that Protestantism took up an inde- 
pendent position among the powers of the world. A 
position so dazzling was a marvelous achievement of 
force and purpose, if only the foundation had been 
sounder and held better promise of duration. 

The war with Spain in which England was now in- 
volved by her aggression in the West Indies roused 
little enthusiasm in the nation. The Parliament did 
not disapprove the war, but showed no readiness to 
vote the money. The Spanish trade in wine, oil, sugar, 
fruit, cochineal, silver, was more important to English 
commerce than the trade with France. It is worthy 
of remark that the Long Parliament had directed its 
resentment and ambition against the Dutch, and dis- 
played no ill will to Spain ; and much the same is true 
of the Little Parliament — and even of Cromwell him- 



FOREIGN POLICY 443 

self in early stages. The association of France in 
the mind of England with Mary Stuart, with the 
queen of Charles I, and with distant centuries of by- 
gone war, was some set-off to the odium that sur- 
rounded the Holy Office, the somber engine of religious 
cruelty in the Peninsula : and the Spanish Armada was 
balanced in popular imagination by the Bartholomew 
Massacre in France, of which Burleigh said that it 
was the most horrible crime since the Crucifixion. 
No question of public opinion and no difficulties at the 
exchequer prevented the vigorous prosecution of the 
war. Blake, though himself a republican, served the 
Protector with the same patriotic energy and resource 
that he had given to the Commonwealth until after 
the most renowned of all his victories, and worn out 
by years of service the hero died on reaching Ply- 
mouth Sound (1657). 

By October of 1655 Mazarin had brought Cromwell 
so far as to sign the treaty of Westminster, but the 
treaty did not go to the length of alliance. The two 
powers agreed to keep the peace among the mariners 
of their respective countries, who had in fact for years 
been in a state of informal war ; to suppress obnoxious 
port dues, and duties of customs, and otherwise to 
introduce better order into their maritime affairs. By 
a secret article, political exiles were to be sent out of 
both England and France. The treaty relieved 
Mazarin of his anxieties on the side of England, and 
brought him a step nearer to his great object of impos- 
ing peace upon Spain. 

It was not until March 23, 1657, that the next step 
was taken, and the Treaty of Paris concluded. This 
marked again a new phase of the Protector's policy, for 
he now at last directly bound himself to active partici- 
pation in the play of European politics, and he acquired 



444 OLIVER CROMWELL 

a continental stronghold. The preamble of the new 
treaty states with sonorous and edifying decorum that 
the intention of the very Christian King and the Lord 
Protector, moved by their singular love of public tran- 
quillity, is to compel the common enemy to allow the 
Christian world at length to enjoy peace. England is 
to send six thousand men for the siege of Gravelines, 
Mardyke, and Dunkirk, as well as a fleet to support 
them on the coast. When these strong places have 
been recovered from the Spanish, the two last-named 
are to be handed over to the Protector. Mazarin 
described the English alliance as the best day's work 
of his life, and begged his assailants at the Vatican and 
in Paris to remember that the Protector had his free 
choice between France and the cession of Dunkirk on 
the one hand, and Spain and the cession of Calais on 
the other, and that only the new treaty had averted 
the choice that would have been the wrong choice for 
France. 

The English force was duly despatched. The young 
French king with lively curiosity reviewed the iron 
men by whom his uncle had been vanquished, de- 
throned, and put to death. Turenne, the famous 
marshal, a Protestant with the blood of the House of 
Orange in his veins, but destined to a strange con- 
version and to be the instrument of one of the great 
public crimes of the century, pronounced the Crom- 
wellian contingent to be the finest troops in the world. 
After some delay Mardyke was taken, and then for- 
mally handed over to the English representative (Oc- 
tober, 1657). It was the first foothold gained by Eng- 
land on continental soil since the loss of Calais in the 
time of Queen Mary a hundred years before. Dun- 
kirk was left until the next season. The glory then 
won by English arms belongs to a later page. 




Frurn tlie painting by Philippe dc Ch.iinpaiguc ai 
CARDINAL JULES MAZARIN. 



FOREIGN POLICY 445 

At the end of 1655, Cromwell told the agent from 
the Great Elector that it was not only to rule over the 
English Republic that he had received a call from God, 
but to introduce union and friendship among the 
princes of Europe. Cool observers from Venice, who 
knew thoroughly the ground that the Protector knew 
so little, predicted in 1655 that his vast and ill-con- 
ceived designs must end in spreading confusion all 
over Christendom. These designs made little prog- 
ress. The Great Elector remonstrated. He warned 
CromwelTs ambassador that in the present state of 
Europe the interest of Protestantism itself required 
them to follow safe rather than specious counsels, 
and to be content with trying to secure freedom of 
conscience by treaty. Instead of a grand Protestant 
league against the German branch of the House of 
Austria, what Oliver saw, with perplexity and anger, 
was violent territorial conflict among the Baltic Prot- 
estant powers themselves. The Swedish king, the 
Danish king, the Great Elector, were all in hot quar- 
rel wnth one another — the quarrel in which Charles X, 
grandson of Gustavus Adolphus, and grandfather of 
Charles XII, astounded Europe by marching twenty 
thousand men across some thirteen miles of frozen sea 
on his path to territorial conquest. The dream of 
Charles, from whom Cromwell hoped so much, was not 
religious, but the foundation of a new Gothic Empire. 
Anabaptists were not more disappointing at home than 
Vv'ere the northern powers abroad. Even the Protes- 
tant cantons of Switzerland did not help him to avenge 
the barbarities in Piedmont. When a new emperor 
came to be chosen, only three of the electors were Prot- 
estant, and one of the Protestant three actually voted 
for the Austrian Leopold. The presence of Crom- 
well's troops in Flanders naturally filled the Dutch with 



446 .OLIVER CROMWELL 

uneasiness, and inclined one Protestant republic again 
to take arms against another. Finally, to hasten the 
decline of Spain was directly to prepare for the ascen- 
dancy of France ; of a country, that is to say, where all 
the predominant influences were Catholic and would 
inevitably revive in unrestrained force as soon as the 
monarchy was once secure. 

Bolingbroke mentions a tradition of which he had 
heard from persons who lived in those days, and whom 
he supposes to have got it from Thurloe, that Crom- 
well was in treaty with Spain and ready to turn his 
arms against France at the moment when he died. So 
soon, it is inferred, did he perceive the harm that would 
be done to the general interest of Europe by that 
French preponderance which his diplomacy had made 
possible and his arms had furthered. But, they say, 
"to do great things a man must act as if he will never 
die," and if Cromwell had only lived, Louis XIV 
would never have dared to revoke the edict of Nantes. 
This is problematical indeed. If the view ascribed 
to Cromwell by some modern admirers was really 
his, it must rank among the contradictory chimeras 
that sometimes haunt great minds. Suppose that 
Cromwell's scheme of Protestant ascendancy in Eu- 
rope had been less hard to reconcile with actual con- 
ditions than it was, how was he to execute it? How 
was the conversion of England into a crusading 
military state, and the vast increase of taxation neces- 
sary to support such a state, calculated to give 
either popularity or strength to a government so pre- 
carious and so unstable, that after five years of experi- 
ment upon experiment it could exist neither with a 
Parliament nor without one? It was the cost of the 
war with Spain that prevented Oliver from being able 
to help the Protestant against the Catholic cantons in 



FOREIGN POLICY 447 

Switzerland, zealous as were his sympathies. And 
one ground of his anxiety to possess Dunkirk was 
trade antagonism to the Dutch, who were at least as 
good Protestants as the English. Oliver's ideal was 
not without a grandeur of its own, but it was incongru- 
ous in its parts, and prolonged trial of it could only 
have made its un workableness more manifest. 

"You have accounted yourselves happy," said the 
Protector in his speech in January, 1658, "in being en- 
vironed by a great ditch from all the world beside. 
Truly you will not be able to keep your ditch nor your 
shipping unless you turn your ships and shipping into 
troops of horse and companies of foot, and fight to 
defend yourselves on terra firma." The great Eliza- 
beth, like Lambert at Cromwell's own council-table, 
believed in the policy of the ditch and "the felicity of 
full coffers," and she left a contented people and a 
settled realm. Cromwell, notwithstanding all the 
glory of his imperial vision of England as a fighting 
continental state, was in fact doing his best to prevent 
either content or the settlement of his own rule in the 
island whence alone all this splendor could first radiate. 

The future growth of vast West Indian interests, of 
which the seizure of Jamaica was the initial step, has 
made it possible to depict Cromwell as the conscious 
author of a great system of colonial expansion. What 
is undoubtedly true is that such ideas were then alive. 
Nor had the famous traditions of the Elizabethans 
died. The Commonwealth from the time of its birth, 
while Cromwell was still engaged in the reduction of 
Scotland, had show^i the same vigor in the case of in- 
surgent colonies as against royalist foes in waters 
nearer home, or against the forces of distraction in 
the two outlying kingdoms. The Navigation Act, 
which belongs to the same date, has been truly de- 



448 OLIVER CROMWELL 

scribed as designed among other nearer objects to 
strengthen the hold of England on her distant posses- 
sions, though it is perhaps a reading of modern phrases 
into old events to say that the statesmen of the Re- 
public deliberately designed to show that England was 
to be not merely a European power, but the center of a 
world-wide empire. Be this as it may, Cromwell's col- 
onial policy was that of his predecessors, as it was that 
of the statemen who followed him. He watched the 
colonies in a rational and conciliatory spirit, and at- 
tended with energy to the settlement of Jamaica, 
though some of his expedients were too hurried to be 
wise, for with the energetic temperament we have to 
take its drawbacks. For his time little came of his 
zealous hopes for the West Indies, and English mer- 
chants thought bitterly on their heavy losses in the 
Spanish trade for which a barren acquisition seemed 
the only recompense. Colonial expansion came in 
spite of the misgivings of interested traders or the 
passing miscalculations of statesmen. 

It had its spring in the abiding demands of national 
circumstance, in the continuous action of economic 
necessities upon a national character of incomparable 
energy and adventure. Such a policy was not, and 
could not be the idea of one man, or the mark of a 
single generation. 



CHAPTER IX 

GROWING EMBARRASSMENTS 

IN France, a century and a quarter after Cromwell's 
day, they said that every clerk who had read Rous- 
seau's "New Helo'isa," every schoolmaster who had 
translated ten pages of Livy, every journalist who 
knew by heart the sophisms of the Social Contract, was 
sure that he had found the philosopher's stone and was 
instantly ready to frame a constitution. Our brave 
fathers of the Cromwellian times were almost as rash. 
There is no branch of political industry that men ap- 
proach with hearts so light, and yet that leaves them 
at the end so dubious and melancholy, as the concoc- 
tion of a Second Chamber. Cromwell and his Parlia- 
ment set foot on this pons asinorum of democracy 
without a suspicion of its dangers. 

The Protector made it a condition at his conferences, 
in the spring of 1657, that if he was to go on there must 
be other persons interposed between him and the House 
of Commons. To prevent tumultuary and popular 
spirits he sought a screen. It was granted that he 
should name another House. Nothing seemed simpler 
or more plausible, and yet he was steering straight 
upon reefs and shoals. A mistake here, said Thur- 
loe, will be like war or marriage; it admits of no re- 
pentance. If the old House of Lords had been alive, 

29 449 



450 OLIVER CROMWELL 

and had also by miracle been sincerely in the humor 
to work for national pacification, to restore it might 
have tended to union. As it was, to call out of empty 
space an artificial House, without the hold upon men's 
minds of history and ancient association, without de- 
fined powers, without marked distinction of persons 
or interests, and then to try to make it an effective 
screen against an elected House to whose assent it owed 
its own being, was not to promote union but directly 
to provoke division and to intensify it. Confident in 
his own good faith, and with a conviction that to frame 
laws in view of contingent possibilities has a tincture 
of impiety in it as a distrust of Providence, Cromwell 
never thought out the scheme ; he left it in the Humble 
Petition and Advice with leaks, chinks, and wide aper- 
tures that might horrify the newest apprentice of a 
Parliamentary draughtsman. The natural result fol- 
lowed. The new House was not to be more than 
seventy in number nor less than forty, to be named by 
the Protector and approved by the House of Commons ; 
a place in it was not hereditary; and it received no 
more impressive title than the Other House. Crom- 
well selected a very respectable body of some sixty 
men, beginning with his two sons, Richard and Henry, 
and including good lawyers, judges, generals, and less 
than a dozen of the old nobles. Some of the ablest, 
like Lockhart and Monk and Henry Cromwell, were 
absent from England, and all of the old nobles save 
five held aloof. Like smaller reformers since, Crom- 
well had never decided, to begin with, whether to make 
his lords strong or weak : strong enough to curb the 
Commons, and yet weak enough for the Commons to 
curb them. The riddle seems unanswered to this day. 
He forgot too that by removing so many men of expe- 
rience and capacity away from the Commons he was 



GROWING EMBARRASSMENTS 451 

impairing the strength of his own government at the 
central point of attack. Attack was certain, for on the 
opening of the second session of his second Parhament 
(January 20, 1658) the ninety members whom he had 
shut out from the first session were to be admitted. 
Some of them, after much consideration, deemed it their 
duty "to leave that tyrant and his packed convention to 
stand upon his sandy foundation," but the majority 
seem to have thought otherwise and they reappeared. 

The looseness of the constituting document made the 
business of an opposition easy, if it were inclined to 
action. One clause undoubtedly enacted that no stand- 
ing law could be altered and no new law made except by 
act of Parliament. As a previous clause had defined 
a Parliament to consist of two Houses, this seemed to 
confer on the Other House a coordinate share in legis- 
lation. On the other hand, the only section dealing 
with the specific attributes of the new House regards it 
as a court of civil and criminal appeal, and the oppo- 
sition argued that the Other House was to be that and 
nothing else. It was here, and on the question of 
government by a single House, that the ground of 
party battle was chosen. Cromwell's enemies had a 
slight majority. After the debate had gone on for 
four days, he addressed them in an urgent remon- 
strance. He dwelt on the alarming state of Europe, 
the combinations against the Protestant interest, the 
discord within that interest itself, the danger of a Span- 
ish invasion to restore the Stuarts, the deadly perils of 
disunion at home. 

The House was deaf. For ten days more the stub- 
born debate on the name and place of the Other House 
went on. Stealthy attempts were made to pervert the 
army in the interest of a republican revival. As in the 
old times of the Long Parliament, the opposition 



452 OLIVER CROMWELL 

worked up petitions in the city. These petitions were 
designed by the malcontents to serve as texts for mo- 
tions and debates in favor of returning to a pure 
commonwealth. On the other wing there were some 
in the Parliament who even held commissions from 
the king. The Protector, well aware of all that was 
on foot, at last could endure it no more. In opening 
the session he had referred to his infirmity of health, 
and the labor of wrestling with the difficulties of his 
place, as Maidstone says, "drank up his spirits, of 
which his natural constitution yielded a vast stock." 
Royalists consoled themselves with stories that he was 
not well in mind or body; that his mutinous officers 
vexed him strangely; and that he was forced to take 
opium to make him sleep. The story of the circum- 
stances of the last dealings of Oliver with a Parliament 
was related as follows : "A mysterious porter brought 
letters addressed to the Protector : Thurloe directed 
Maidstone, the steward, to take them to his Highness. 
The door of the apartment was closed, but on his 
knocking very hard, Cromwell cried out angrily to 
know who was there. Presently he unbarred the door, 
took the letters, and shut himself in again. By-and- 
l^y he sent for Whalley and Desborough, who were 
to be in command of the guard that night. Lie asked 
them if they had heard no news, and on their saying 
no, he again asked if they had not heard of a petition. 
He bade them go to Westminster. On their way they 
heard some of the soldiers using disaffected words. 
This they immediately reported, and Oliver told them 
to change the ordering of the guards for the night. The 
next morning (February 4), before nine o'clock he 
called for his breakfast, telling Thurloe, who chanced 
to be ill, that he would go to the House, at which Thur- 
loe wondered why his Highness resolved so suddenly. 



GROWING EMBARRASSMENTS 453 

He did not tell him why, but he was resolved to go. 
"And when he had his meal, he withdrew himself, 
and went the back way, intending alone to have gone 
by water; but the ice was so as he could not; then he 
came the foot way, and the first man of the guard he 
saw he commanded him to press the nearest coach, 
which he did, with but two horses in it, and so he went 
with not above four footmen, and about five or six of 
the guards to the House ; after which, retiring into the 
withdrawing room, drank a cup of ale and ate a piece 
of toast. Then the Lord Fiennes, near to him, asked 
his Highness what he intended ; he said he would dis- 
solve the House. Upon which the Lord Fleetwood 
said, T beseech your Highness consider first well of it ; 
it is of great consequence.' He replied, 'You are a 
milksop: by the living God I will dissolve the House.' 
(Some say he iterated this twice, and some say it was, 
'As the Lord liveth.')" 

His speech was for once short and concentrated, and 
he did not dissemble his anger. "What is like to 
come upon this," he concluded, "the enemy being ready 
to invade us, but our present blood and confusion? 
And if this be so, I do assign it to this cause : your not 
assenting to what you did invite me to by your Petition 
and Advice, as that which might prove the settlement 
of the nation. And if this be the end of your sitting, 
and this be your carriage, I think it high time that an 
end be put to your sitting. And I so dissolve this 
Parliament. And let God be judge between you and 
me." To which end, says one report, many of the 
Commons cried Amen. 

Cromwell's government had gone through six stages 
in the five years since the revolution of 1653. The 
first was a dictatorship tempered by a military council. 
Second, while wielding executive power as lord-gen- 



454 OLIVER CROMWELL 

eral, he called a Parliamentary convention. Third, 
the convention vanished, and the soldiers installed him 
as Protector under the Instrument. Fourth, the sys- 
tem under the Instrument broke down, and for months 
the Protectorate again meant the personal rule of the 
head of the army. Fifth, the rule of the major-gen- 
erals broke down, and was followed by a kind of con- 
stitutional monarchy. Sixth, the monarch and the 
Parliament quarreled, and the constitution broke 
down. This succession of expedients and experi- 
ments may have been inevitable in view of the fun- 
damental dislocation of things after rebellion and 
war. But in face of such a spectacle and such results 
it is hardly possible to claim for the triumphant soldier 
a high place in the history of original and creative 
statesmanship. 

The Protector next flung himself into the work of 
tracking out the conspirators. That the design of a 
Spanish invasion to fit in with domestic insurrection 
would hopelessly miscarry may have been probable. 
That the fidelity of the army could be relied upon, he 
hardly can have doubted. But a ruler bearing all the 
responsibilities of a cause and a nation cannot afford 
to trust to the chapter of accidents. We who live two 
centuries off cannot pretend to measure the extent of 
the danger, but nobody can read the depositions of 
witnesses in the cases of the spring of 1658 without 
feeling the presence of mischief that even the most 
merciful of magistrates was bound to treat as grave. 
The nation showed no resentment against treasonable 
designs ; it was not an ordered and accepted govern- 
ment against which they were directed. This did not 
lighten the necessity of striking hard at what Henry 
Cromwell called these recurring anniversary mischiefs. 
Examples were made in the persons of Sir Henry 



m^mmnmf i mmmnnnmummmmmmm mmmmmmm 




mmmmmmmmmimmmmmmmmm mmm 



From the original portrait by Cornelius Janssen at Chequers Court, by permission 
of Mrs. Frankland-Russell-Astley. 

MARY CROMWELL (LADY FAUCONBERG). 



GROWING EMBARRASSMENTS 455 

Sliiigsby, Dr. Hewitt, and some obscurer persons. 
Hewitt was an Episcopal clergyman, an acceptable 
preacher to those of his own way of thinking, a fervent 
Royalist : the evidence is strong that he was deep in 
Stuart plots. Slingsby's case is less clear. That he 
was a Royalist and a plotter is certain, but the evidence 
suggests that there was some ugly truth in what he 
said on his trial that he was "trepanned" by agents of 
the government who, while he was in their custody at 
Hull, extracted his secrets from him by pretending to 
favor his aims. The high courts of justice before 
which these and other prisoners of the same stamp were 
arraigned did not please steady lawyers like White- 
locke, but the Protector thought them better fitted to 
terrify evil-doers than an ordinary trial at common 
law. Though open to all the objections against special 
criminal tribunals, the high courts of justice during 
Cromwell's reign were conducted with temper and 
fairness : they always had good lawyers among them, 
and the size of the court, never composed of less than 
thirty members, gave it something of the quality of 
trial by jury. It is said that Hewitt had privately per- 
formed the service according to the Anglican rite at 
the recent marriage of Mary Cromwell with Lord 
Fauconberg, and that the bride interceded for his 
life, but the Protector was immovable, and both 
Slingsby and Hewitt were sent to the scalTold (June. 
1658). Plots were once more for a season driven 
underground. But it is impossible that the grim and 
bloody circumstances of their suppression could have 
helped the popularity of the government. 

Meanwhile the Protectorate was sinking deeper and 
deeper into the bog of financial difficulty. "We are so 
out at the heels here," Thurloe says in April, "that I 
know not what we shall do for money." At the end 



456 OLIVER CROMWELL 

of the month he reports that the clamor for money 
both from the sea and land is such that they can scarce 
be borne. Henry Cromwell, now lord deputy in Ire- 
land, is in the last extremity. Hunger, he says, will 
break through stone walls, and if they are kept so bare, 
they will soon have to cease all industry and sink to 
the brutish practices of the Irish themselves. Fleet- 
wood is sure they spend as little public money except 
for public needs as any government ever did ; but their 
expenses, he admits, were extraordinary, and could not 
with safety be retrenched. In June things are still 
declared to be at a standstill. The sums required could 
not possibly be supplied without a Parliament, and in 
that direction endless perils lurked. Truly, I think, 
says Thurloe, that nothing but some unexpected Provi- 
dence can remove the present difficulties, which the 
Lord, it may be, will afford us, if He hath thoughts of 
peace toward us. By July things are even worse, 
"our necessities much increasing every day." 

Cromwell threw the deliberations on the subject of 
a Parliament on to a junto of nine. What was the 
Parliament to do when it should meet ? How was the 
government to secure itself against Cavaliers on one 
hand, and Commonwealth ultras on the other? For 
the Cavaliers some of the junto suggested an oath of 
abjuration and a fine of half their estates. This was 
not very promising. The Cavaliers might take the 
oath, and yet not keep it. To punish Cavaliers who 
were innocent, for the sins of the plotters would be 
recognized as flagrantly unjust; and as many of the 
old Cavaliers were now dead, it was clearly impolitic 
by such injustice to turn their sons into irreconcilables. 
The only thing in the whole list of constitutional diffi- 
culties on which the junto could agree was that the 



GROWING EMBARRASSMENTS 457 

Protector should name his successor. If this close 
council could only come to such meager conclusion 
upon the vexed questions inseparable from that revi- 
sion which, as everybody knew, must be faced, what 
gain could be expected from throwing the same ques- 
tions on the floor of a vehemently distracted Parlia- 
ment? There is reason even for supposing that in his 
straits Oliver sounded some of the republicans, includ- 
ing men of such hard grit as Ludlow and Vane. Henry 
Cromwell was doubtful and suspicious of any such 
combination, and laid down the wholesome principle, 
in party concerns, that one that runs along with you 
may more easily trip up the heels than he that wrestles 
with you. We go wrong in political judgment if we 
leave out rivalries, heart-burnings, personalities, even 
among leading men and great men. History is apt 
to smooth out these rugosities; hero-worship may 
smooth them out; time hides them; but they do their 
work. Less trace of personal jealousy or cabal is to 
be found in the English rebellion than in almost any 
other revolutionary movement in history, and Crom- 
well himself was free from these disfigurements of 
public life. Of Lambert, fine soldier and capable man 
as he was, we cannot affirm so much, and he had 
confederates. Henry Cromwell's clear sight never 
failed him, and he perceived that the discussion was 
idle. "Have you, after all," he asks Thurloe, "got any 
settlement for men to swear to ? Does not your peace 
depend upon his Highness' life, and upon his peculiar 
skill and faculty, and personal interest in the army as 
now modelled and commanded? I say, beneath the 
immediate hand of God, if I know anything of the 
affairs of England, there is no other reason why we are 
not in blood at this day." In other words, no settle- 



458 OLIVER CROMWELL 

ment was even now in sight, and none was possible if 
Cromwell's mighty personality should be withdrawn. 
This judgment from such a man is worth a whole 
chapter of modern dissertation. It was the whole 
truth, to none known better than to the Lord Protector 
himself. 



CHAPTER X 



THE CLOSE 



ONE parting beam of splendor broke through the 
clouded skies. The Protector, in conformity 
with the revised treaty made with France in March 
(1658), had despatched six thousand foot, as well as a 
naval contingent, as auxiliaries to the French in an 
attack by land and sea upon Dunkirk. The famous 
Turenne was in general command of the allied forces, 
with Lockhart under his orders at the head of the Eng- 
lish six thousand. Dramatic elements were not want- 
ing. Cardinal Mazarin was on the ground, and Louis 
XIV, then a youth of twenty, was learning one of his 
early lessons in the art of war. In the motley Spanish 
forces confronting the French king were his cousins 
the Duke of York and the Duke of Gloucester, the two 
sons of Charles I, and like Louis himself grandsons of 
Henry of X^avarre. Along with the English princes 
were the brigades of Irish and Royalist English who 
had followed the fortunes of the exiled line, and who 
now once more faced the ever-victorious Ironsides. 
Cromwell sent Fauconberg, his new son-in-law, to 
Calais with letters of salutation and compliment to 
the French king and his minister, accompanied by a 
present of superb English horses. The emissary was 
received with . extraordinary courtesies alike by the 

459 



46o OLIVER CROMWELL 

monarch and the cardinal, and the latter even conducted 
him by the hand to the outer door, a compliment that 
he had never before been known to pay to the ambassa- 
dor of any crowned head. 

The Battle of the Dunes (June 14) was fought 
among the sandhills of Dunkirk, and ended in the de- 
struction of the Spanish army. "The English," says 
a French eye-witness, "pike in hand, charged with such 
stubborn vigor the eight Spanish battalions posted on 
the high ground of the downs, that in face of musketry 
fire and stout resistance the English drove them head- 
long from their position." These were the old or 
natural Spaniards as distinguished from Walloon and 
German, and were the flowei of the Spanish army. 
Their position was so strong that Lockhart at first 
thought it desperate; and when all was over he called 
it the hottest dispute that he had ever seen. The two 
.Stuart princes are said to have forgotten their wrongs 
at the hand of the soldier who had trained that invin- 
cible band, and to have felt a thrill of honorable pride 
at the gallantry of their countrymen. Turenne's vic- 
tory was complete, and in a week Dunkirk surrendered. 
Then came a bitter moment for the French. The king 
received Dunkirk from the Spaniards, only to hand 
over the keys according to treaty to the English, and 
Lockhart at once took possession in the name of the 
Lord Protector. Mazarin knew the price he was pay- 
ing to be tremendous. The French historians^ think 
that he foresaw that English quarrels would one day 
be sure to enable France to recover it by sword or 
purse, and so in time they did. Meanwhile the Iron- 
sides gave the sage and valiant Lockhart trouble by 
their curiosity about the churches : they insisted on 
keeping their heads covered ; some saw in the sacred 

1 Bourelly, p. 261. Cheruel Hist, de F^-ance sons Mazarin, iii. 292-5. 




From the original portrait by John Riley, by permission of 
the Rev. T. Cromwell Bush. 

FRANCES CROMWELL (MRS. RICH, AFTERWARD LADY RUSSELL). 



41 



THE CLOSE 461 

treasures good material for loot ; and one of them 
nearly caused a violent affray by lighting his pipe at 
a candle on the altar where a priest was saying Mass. 
But Lockhart was strict, and discipline prevailed. 
Hardly less embarrassing than want of reverence in the 
soldiery were the long discourses with which Hugh 
Peters, the Boanerges of the military pulpit, would 
fain have regaled his singular ally, the omnipotent 
cardinal. Louis XIV despatched a mission of much 
magnificence bearing to Cromwell a present of a sword 
of honor with a hilt adorned with precious gems. In 
after days when Louis had become the arch-persecutor 
and the shining champion of divine right, the pride of 
the Most Christian King was mortified by recollecting 
the profuse compliments that he had once paid to the 
impious regicide. 

The glory of their ruler's commanding place in 
Europe gratified English pride, but it brought no com- 
posure into the confused and jarring scene. It rather 
gave new nourishment to the root of evil. "The 
Lord is pleased to do wonderfully for his Highness," 
said Thurloe after Dunkirk, "and to bless him in his 
affairs beyond expression," but- he speedily reverts 
to the grinding necessity of putting affairs on some 
better footing. Men with cool heads perceived that 
though continental acquisitions might strengthen our 
security in one way, yet by their vast cost they must 
add heavily to the financial burdens that constituted 
the central weakness of the Protectorate, and pre- 
vented the real settlement of a governing system. 
For the Protector himself the civil difiiculties against 
which he had for seven years with such manful faith 
and heroic persistency contended were now soon to 
come to an end. He told his last Parliament that he 
looked upon himself as one set on a watch-tower to 



462 OLIVER CROMWELL 

see what may be for the good of these nations, and 
what may be for the preventing of evil. The hour of 
the dauntless sentinel's relief soon sounded. Death 
had already this year stricken his household more than 
one sore blow. Rich, who had married Frances 
Cromwell in November, died in February. Elizabeth 
Claypole lost her youngest son in June. All through 
the summer Elizabeth herself was torn by a cruel 
malady, and in August she died at Hampton Court. 
For many days her father, insensible even to the cares 
of public business, watched with ceaseless devotion by 
the bedside of the dearest of his children. He was 
himself ill with gout and other distempers, and his 
disorders were aggravated by close vigils and the depth 
of his affliction. A low fever seized him, presently 
turning to a dangerous ague. He met his council 
from time to time and attended to affairs as long as 
he was able. It was in these days (August 20) that 
George Fox met him riding in Hampton Court, "and 
before I came to him," says the mystic, "as he rode at 
the head of his lifeguard I saw and felt a waft of death 
go forth against him." A little later he was taken to 
London, and while St. James's was being made ready, 
he stayed at Whitehall. He quitted it no more. "He 
had great discoveries of the Lord to him in his sickness, 
and had some assurances of his being restored and 
made further serviceable in his work. Never was 
there a greater stock of prayers going for any man 
than there is now going for him, and truly there is a 
general consternation upon the spirits of all men, good 
and bad, fearing what may be the event of it, should it 
please God to take his Highness at this time. Men's 
hearts seemed as sunk within them." When the great 
warrior knew that the end was sure, he met it with the 
confident resignation of his faith. He had seen death 



THE CLOSE 463 

too often and too near to dread the parting hour of 
mortal anguish. Chaplains, preachers, godly persons, 
attended in an adjoining room, and came in and out, 
as the heavy hours went on, to read the Bible to him or 
to pray with him. To one of them he put the moving 
question, so deep with penitential meaning, so pathetic 
in its humility and misgiving, in its wistful recall of 
the bright bygone dawn of life in the soul : "Tell me, 
is it possible to fall from grace f" "No, it is not pos- 
sible," said the minister. "Then," said the dying 
Cromwell, "/ am safe, for I knozv that I zvas once in 
grace." 

With weighty repetitions and great vehemency of 
spirit he quoted the texts that have awed or consoled 
so many generations of believing men. In broken 
murmurs of prayer he besought the favor of Heaven 
for the people; that they might have consistency of 
judgment, one heart, and mutual love ; that they and 
the work of reformation might be delivered. "Thou 
hast made me, though very unworthy, a mean instru- 
ment to do them some good, and thee service ; and 
many of them have set too high a value upon me, 
though others wish and would be glad of my death. 
Pardon such as desire to trample on the dust of a poor 
worm, for they are thy people too." All the night of 
the 2d of September he was very restless, and "there 
being something to drink offered him, he was desired 
to take the same and to endeavor to sleep ; unto which 
he answered, 'It is not my design to drink or to sleep, 
but my design is to make zvhat haste I can to be gone.' " 
On Monday, the 30th of August, a wild storm had 
raged over land and sea, and while Cromwell was 
slowly sinking, the days broke upon houses shattered, 
mighty trees torn up by the roots, foundered ships, and 
drowninsf men. 



464 OLIVER CROMWELL 

Friday, the 3d of September, was the anniversary 
of two of his most famous victories. It was just eight 
years since with radiant eye he had watched the sun 
rise over the ghstening waters at Dunbar, and seen the 
scattering of the enemies of the Lord. Now he lay in 
the stupor of helpless death, and about four o'clock in 
the afternoon his days came to their end. 

His remains were privately interred in King Henry 
the Seventh's chapel three weeks later, and for a cou- 
ple of months a waxen effigy in robes of state with 
crown and scepter was exhibited at Somerset House. 
Then (November 23) the public funeral took place, 
with profuse and regal pomp, and amid princes, law- 
givers, and warriors who have brought renown and 
power to the name of England the dust of Oliver 
Cromwell lay for a season in the great time-hallowed 
Minster. 

In a little more than two years the hour of ven- 
geance struck, and a base and impious revenge it 
proved. A unanimous resolution of the House of Com- 
mons directed the savage ceremonial, and the date was 
the anniversary (January 30, 1661) of the execution of 
King Charles twelve years before. "It was kept as a 
very solemn day of fasting and prayer. This morn- 
ing the carcases of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw 
(which the day before had been brought from the 
Red Lion Inn, Holborn) were drawn upon a sledge 
to Tyburn .[a stone's throw from where the Marble 
Arch now stands], and then taken out of their coffins, 
and in their shrouds hanged by the neck until the 
going down of the sun. | They were then cut down, 
their heads taken off, and their bodies buried in a 
grave under the gallows. The coffin in which was 
the body of Cromwell was a very rich thing, very 
full of gilded hinges and nails." The three heads 







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From a miniature by Crosse at Windsor Castle. By special 
permission of Her Majesty the Queen. 

ELIZABETH CROMWELL (MRS. CLAYPOLE). 



THE CLOSE 465 

were fixed upon poles, and set np at the southern end 
of Westminster Hall, where Pepys saw them four 
days after on the spot at which the regicides had 
judged the king.^ 

To imply that Cromwell stands in the line of Euro- 
pean dictators with Charles V or Louis XIV or Napo- 
leon is a hyperbole which does him both less than 
justice and more. Guizot brings us nearer to the 
truth when he counts Cromwell, William HI, and 
Washington as chief and representative of sovereign 
crises that have settled the destinies of nations. When 
we go on to ask what was Cromwell's special share 
in a mission so supreme, the answer, if we seek it 
away from the prepossessions of modern controversy, 
is not hard to discern. It was by his military genius, 
by the might of the legions that he created and con- 
trolled and led to victory upon victory ; it was at Mars- 
ton and Naseby, at Preston and Worcester, in Ireland 
and at Dunbar, that Cromwell set his deep mark on 
the destinies of England as she was, and of that vaster 
dominion into which the English realm was in the 
course of ages to be transformed. He was chief of a 
party who shared his own strong perception that nei- 
ther civil freedom nor political could be made secure 
without the sword, and happily the swordsman showed 
himself consummate. In speed and vigor, in dash and 
in prudence, in force of shock and quick steadiness 
of recovery; in sieges, marches, long, wasting cam- 
paigns, pitched engagements ; as commander of horse, 
as tactician, and as strategist, the modern expert ranks 
Cromwell among the foremost masters of the rough 
art of war. Above all, he created the instrument 

1 So I read Pepys. In any case, however, evidence points to the fact 
that the heads were ultimately fixed on the roof outside. 
30 



466 OLIVER CROMWELL 

which, in discipHne, skill, and those highest military 
virtues that come of moral virtues, has never been 
surpassed. 

In our own half-century now closing, alike in west- 
ern Europe and across the Atlantic, the torch of war 
has been lighted rather for Unity of race or state than 
for Liberty. Cromwell struck for both. It was his 
armed right hand that crushed the absolutist preten- 
sions alike of crown and miter, and then forced the 
three kingdoms into the mold of a single state. It 
was at those decisive moments when the trembling bal- 
ance hung on fortune in the battle-field that the un- 
conquerable captain turned the scale. After we have 
discussed all the minor aspects of his special policies 
on this occasion or the other, after we have scanned all 
the secondary features' of his rule, this is still what in 
a single sentence defines the true place of Cromwell in 
our history. 

Along with this paramount claim, he performed the 
service of keeping a provisional form of peace and de- 
livering the nation from the anarchy in which both 
order and freedom w^ould have been submerged. He 
made what some of the best of his contemporaries 
thought mistakes ; he forsook some principles, in his 
choice of means, which he intended to preserve in work- 
ing out the end ; and some of his difficulties were of his 
own creation. Yet watchfulness, self-effacement, ver- 
satility and resource, for the time and on the surface, 
repaired all, and as "constable of the parish" his per- 
sistency was unfaltering and unmatched. In the 
harder task of laying the foundations of a deeper order 
that might be expected to stand after his own imperious 
control should be withdrawn, he was beaten. He 
hardly counted on more. In words already quoted, "I 
did out of necessity," he said, "undertake that business,. 



THE CLOSE 467 

not so much out of a hope of doing any good as out 
of a desire to prevent mischief and evil." He reared 
no dam, no bulwark strong enough to coerce either 
the floods of revolutionary faction or the reactionary 
tides that came after. "Does not your peace," as 
Henry Cromwell asked, "depend upon his Highness's 
life, and upon his peculiar skill and faculty and per- 
sonal interest in the army?" That is to say, the Pro- 
tectorate was no system, but only an expedient of indi- 
vidual supremacy. 

Richard Cromwell, it is true, acceded without oppo- 
sition. For a few months the new Protector bore the 
outward ensigns of supreme power, but the reality of 
it was not his for a day. The exchequer was so di- 
lapidated that he underwent the humiliation of beg- 
ging Mazarin to lend him fifty thousand pounds. The 
Council of War sought an early opportunity of setting 
up their claim to military predominance. The ma- 
jority in the new Parliament was undoubtedly favor- 
able at first to Richard and his government, but a 
constitution depending for its life on the fluctuations 
of majority and minority in incessant divisions in the 
lobbies of the House of Commons was evidently not 
worth a month's purchase. Authority in the present 
was sapped and dislodged by arraigning the past. 
Financial deficit and abuses in administration were ex- 
posed to rigorous assault. Prisoners of state, com- 
mitted on no more lawful warrant than the Protector's 
will, were brought up to the bar from the Tower and 
strong places elsewhere, attended by applauding 
crowds, and received with marks of sympathy for the 
victim and resentment against the dead oppressor. 
Dunkirk, Jamaica, the glories of Blake, the humili- 
ation of Spain, went for nothing against the losses of 
trade. The struggle between Parliament and army. 



468 OLIVER CROMWELL 

so long quelled by the iron hand of Oliver, but which 
he was never able to bring to enduring adjustment, 
broke into flame. Richard Cromwell, a man of honor 
and sense, but without the prestige of a soldier, suc- 
cumbed and disappeared (May, 1659). The old quar- 
rel between military power and civil fought itself to 
an end in one of those squalid scenes of intrigue, 
egotism, mutual reproach, political impotency, in 
which so many revolutions since have expired. Hap- 
pily no blood was shed. Then the ancient line was 
recalled, the Cavaliers infuriated by old defeat and 
present ruin, the bishops eager to clamber into their 
thrones again, the bulk of the nation on the same 
side. At the new king's right hand was Clarendon ; 
but fourteen years of exile, with all its privations, con- 
tumelies, and heartsickness of hope perpetually de- 
ferred, had soured him and blotted out from his mind 
the principles and aspirations of the old days when he 
had stood by the side of Pym and Hampden against 
Laud, Strafford, and Charles. The monarchy no 
doubt came back with its claims abated. So much the 
sword of Oliver had made safe. But how little had 
been permanently done for that other cause, more pre- 
cious in Oliver's sight than all the rest, w^as soon shown 
by the Act of Uniformity, the Test Act, the Conven- 
ticle Act, the Five Mile Act, and the rest of the appa- 
ratus of church privilege and proscription. 

It is hard to resist the view that Cromwell's revolu- 
tion was the end of the medieval, rather than the be- 
ginning of the modern era. He certainly had little 
of that faith in Progress that became the inspiration of 
a later age. His respect for Public Opinion, supposed 
to be the driving force of modern government, was a 
strictly limited regard. In one sense he was no demo- 
crat, for he declared, as we have seen, that the ques- 




Drawn by George T. Tobin from the portrait by Sir Peter Lely in the 
Pitti Gallery, Florence. 



OMVER CROMWELL AT THE AGE OF FIFTY-ONE. 



THE CLOSE 469 

tion is not what pleases people, but what is for their 
good. This came rather near to Charles's words upon 
the scaffold, that the people's liberty lay in the laws, 
"not their having a share in government; that is noth- 
ing pertaining to them." 

On the other hand, he was equally strong that 
things obtained by force, though never so good in 
themselves, are both less to the ruler's honor and less 
likely to last. "What we gain in a free way, it is bet- 
ter than twice as much in a forced, and will be more 
truly ours and our posterity's" (ante, Book III., Chap, 
iii. ) ; and the safest test of any constitution is its ac- 
ceptance by the people. And again : "It will be found 
an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his 
natural liberty upon a supposition he may abuse it." 
The root of all external freedom is here. 

In saying that Cromwxll had the spirit, insight, and 
grasp that fit a man to wield power in the greatest 
affairs, we only repeat that he had the instinct of gov- 
ernment, and this is a very different thing from either 
a taste for the abstract ideas of politics, or the passion 
for liberty. The instinct of order has been as often 
the gift of a tyrant as of a hero, as common to some 
of the worst hearts in human history as to some of the 
best. Cromwell was no Frederick the Great, who 
spoke of mankind as diese vcrdammte Race — that ac- 
cursed tribe. He belonged to the rarer and nobler type 
of governing men who see the golden side, who count 
faith, pity, hope, among the counsels of practical wis- 
dom, and who for political power must ever seek a 
moral base. This is a key to men's admiration for 
him. His ideals were high, his fidelity to them, while 
sometimes clouded, was still enduring, his ambition 
was pure. Yet it can hardly be accident that has 
turned him into one of the idols of the school who hold, 



470 OLIVER CROMWELL 

shyly as yet in England, but nakedly in Germany, that 
might is a token of right, and that the strength and 
power of the state is an end that tests and justifies 
all means. 

When it is claimed that no English ruler did more 
than Cromwell to shape the future of the land he gov- 
erned, we run some risk of straining history only to 
procure incense for retrograde ideals. Many would 
contend that Thomas Cromwell, in deciding the future 
of one of the most powerful standing institutions of 
the country, exercised a profounder influence than 
Oliver. Then, if Cromwell did little to shape the fu- 
ture of the Church of England, neither did he shape 
the future of the Parliament of England. On the side 
of constitutional construction, unwelcome as it may 
sound, a more important place belongs to the sage and 
steadfast, though most unheroic, Walpole. The devel- 
opment of the English constitution has in truth pro- 
ceeded on lines that Cromwell profoundly disliked. 
The idea of a Parliament always sitting and actively 
reviewing the details of administration was in his sight 
an intolerable mischief. It was almost the only sys- 
tem against which his supple mind, so indifferent as it 
was to all constitutional forms, was inflexible. Yet 
this for good or ill is our system to-day, and the sys- 
tem of the great host of political communities that 
have followed our parliamentary model. When it is 
said, again, that it was owing to Cromwell that non- 
conformity had time to take such deep root as to defy 
the storm of the Restoration, do we not overlook the 
original strength of all those great Puritan fibers from 
which both the Rebellion and Cromwell himself had 
sprung? It was not a man, not even such a man as 
Oliver; it was the same underlying spiritual forces that 
had made the Revolution which also held fast against 



THE CLOSE 471 

the Pvcstoration. We might as well say that Crom- 
well was the founder of nonconformity. 

It has been called a common error of our day to 
ascribe far too much to the designs and the influence 
of eminent men, of rulers, and of governments. The 
reproach is just and should impress us. The momen- 
tum of past events, the spontaneous impulses of the 
mass of a nation or a race, the pressure of general 
hopes and fears, the new things learned in "novel 
spheres of thought," all have more to do with the 
progress of human affairs than the deliberate views 
of even the most determined and far-sighted of our 
individual leaders. Thirty years after the death of 
the Protector a more successful revolution came about. 
The law was made more just, the tribunals were puri- 
fied, the press began to enjoy a freedom for which 
Milton had made a glorious appeal, but which Crom- 
well dared not concede, the rights of conscience re- 
ceived at least a partial recognition. Yet the Decla- 
ration of Right and the Toleration Act issued from a 
stream of ideas and maxims, aims and methods, that 
were not Puritan. New tributaries had already swol- 
len the volume and changed the currents of that broad 
confluence of manners, morals, government, belief, on 
whose breast Time guides the voyages of mankind. 
The age of rationalism, with its bright lights and 
sobering shadows, had begun. Some ninety years 
after 1688 another revolution followed in the England 
across the Atlantic, and the gulf between Cromwell 
and Jefferson is measure of the vast distance that the 
minds of men had traveled. With the death of Crom- 
well the brief life of Puritan theocracy in England ex- 
pired. It was a phase of a movement that left an in- 
heritance of some noble thoughts, the memory of a 
brave struggle for human freedom, and a procession 



4/2 OLIVER CROMWELL 

of strenuous master spirits, with Milton and Crom- 
well at their head. Political ends miscarry, and the 
revolutionary leader treads a path of fire. It is our 
true W'isdom to learn how to combine sane and equit- 
able historic verdicts with a just value for those eternal 
qualities of high endeavor, on which amid all changes 
of fashion, formula, direction, fortune, in all times and 
places the world's best hopes depend. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Adwalton, 134 

Agitators (army representatives), 

213-215, 222, 237 
Agreement of the People (1647), 221, 

225; (1648), 225; (1649), 225, 

359. 424 
American Constitution, Instrument 
of Government compared with, 

362-3 . 

Anabaptism, Cromwell's relation to, 
412 

Andrews, Dean of Limerick, 33 

Anglican Church — 

Arminianism in, 52; assumptions 
of, 22 ; Charles I's devotion to, 
201-2 ; Cromwell's attitude to- 
ward, 368, 411; ecclesiastical 
courts, 57; endowments of, cov- 
eted, 170; episcopacy, abolition 
of, proposed, 145 ; excluded from 
toleration, 362, 367 ; forbidden by 
ordinance, 368, 371 ; influence of, 
after the Restoration, 5 ; reform of, 
attempted (1641), 88-91 ; West- 
minster Assembly, non-attend- 
ance of Anglicans at, 147 

Anne of Denmark, 25 

Archers, Il6 

Areopagitica, 159 

Argyle, Marquis of, Hamilton vic- 
torious over, 238 ; Cromwell's bar- 
gain with, 246; defeat of, 312 

Arminianism denounced at Synod 
of Dort, II; Pym's attitude to- 
ward, 39; doctrines of, 52-54; 
parliamentary declaration against, 

59 
Armor, disuse of, 1 16 
Arms, 1 16- 1 18 
Army, the — 

Agitators, 213-215, 222, 237; 

agreement of the people issued 

by (1647), 221, 225; Case of the 



Army Stated issued by, 225 ; con- 
trol and numbers of, regulated by 
Instrument of Government, 361, 
378; control retained by Crom- 
well, 379; debates of, 222-3, 224- 
232 ; depression of, 239 ; disband- 
ment of, attempted, 212-214, 223 ; 
heads of the proposals of, 225, 
359 i legislative incapacity of, 348- 
349; London, march on (1648), 
259; mutiny in, 237 ; New Model, 
composition of, 170-3; contem- 
porary estimates of, 177; parlia- 
ment threatened by, 217-18; 
remonstrance presented to Par- 
liament by (1648), 251; sickness 
of, in Ireland, 293 ; temper of, 
after Naseby, 222 

Artillery, 1 1 7-18 

Assassination of Cromwell plotted, 
385, 406-8 



Baillie, Robert, cited on Strafford's 
trial, 80; on Independents, 154; 
on confiscation of Church endow- 
ments, 170; on the New Model, 
177; Major-General William, at 
Marston, 137, 143; ordered to 
surrender to Cromwell, 245 

Barebones's Parliament. See Little 
Parliament 

Basing House, storming of, 190-1 

Baxter, Richard, ecclesiastical views 
of, 90; two interviews with Crom- 
well, 430-1 ; cited on rehgious 
ferment in 1644, 147; on the New 
Model, 172, 222; on Cromwell's 
ecclesiastical settlement, 369-70 

Beard, Dr., Ii 

Behemoth, cited, 54 

Berwick, pacification of, 65 ; Crom- 
well's recovery of, 246 



475 



476 



INDEX 



Bible, the, Cromwell's acceptance 
of, 50-52 ; Walton's polyglot ver- 
sion of, 429 

Biddle, Jehn, Cromwell's protection 
of, 403-4 

Blake, Admiral, naval successes of, 
198, 321, 323; ability of, 431; 
sent by Cromwell to Mediterra- 
nean, 438; death of, 443 

Bossuet, cited on Queen Henrietta 
Maria, 27-9; on universal his- 
tory. 355 

Bourchier, Elizabeth, wife of Crom- 
well, 13 

Bradshaw, John, president at 
Charles's trial, 264, 269-70; with- 
stands Cromwell at the dissolu- 
tion of Long Parliament, 336-7; 
in first parliament of Protectorate, 
373 ; withstands Cromwell's com- 
pulsion of parliament (1654), 377; 
Cromwell's efforts against, 397; 
remains of, desecrated, 464; en- 
ergy and capacity of, 338 

Bramhall, John, Cromwell's opinion 
of, 90 

Bristol, royalist capture of, 134 ; 
capitulation of, to Fairfax, Ib8; 
Nayler at, 403 

Brook, Lord, death of, 1 30 

Bunker Hill, Marston Moor com- 
pared with, 168 

Burke, Edmund, Cromwell esti- 
mated by, 2 ; Cromwell and Ire- 
ton compared with, 225-33 

Burnet, Gilbert, cited on Cromwell's 
Latin, 1 1-12 ; on Henrietta Maria, 

31 
Burton, Henry, 61-2, 146 
Butler, Bishop, opinion on Charles's 

trial, 268-9 



Calvinism, Arminianism crushed 
by, II ; scope of, 47-48, 55 

Cambridge, Cromwell at Sidney 
Sussex College, 11 ; his represen- 
tation of, in Short Parliament, 66 ; 
in Long Parliament, 74 ; his ac- 
tivity in (1642), 119 

Carlyle, Thomas, estimate of Crom- 
well, 2-3 ; contrast of French 
Jacobins and English sectaries, 
221 ; estimate of Charles's execu- 
tion, 272-3 ; enthusiasm for action 



without rhetoric, 286 ; description 
of Dunbar, 307 

Carnwath, Lord, at Naseby, 184 

Case of the Army Stated, 224-5 

Catholicism — 

Court, at, 25, 43 ; Cromwell's re- 
ply to manifesto of prelates, 294-5 > 
France, predominant in, 43, 439, 
446; Holland, in, 43; Ireland, in, 
95, 283-4, 405 ; Ormonde's Kil- 
kenny treaty, 284; Laud's attitude 
toward, 37; persecution of, 412- 
413; toleration denied to, 158, 
362,367,412 

Cavalry tactics, 1 15, 1 18, 126-7, 137- 
140, 182 

Chalgrove Field, 131 

Chancery, Court of, abolition of, 
349; Cromwell's attempted re- 
form of, 365 

Charles I — 

Chronological Seqiience of Career. 
Attempts religious coercion in 
Scotland, 64; persecutes Sir John 
Eliot, 66, 86, 286 ; dismisses Short 
Parliament, 68; abandons Straf- 
ford, 84; declares adherence to 
Church of England, 93 ; returns 
from Scotland, 100; approaches 
parliamentary leaders, 102 ; im- 
peaches five members, 103 ; raises 
royal standard, 106; gains military 
successes, 134; storms Leicester, 
176; Naseby, 180, 184; escapes 
from Oxford, 195 ; surrenders to 
the Scots, 196 ; considers terms 
of settlement, 201 ; at Holmby, 
208; removed from Holmby, 214, 
215 ; escapes from Hampton Court 
to Carisbrooke Castle, 233-4 ; 
concludes secret treaty with the 
Scots, 236; negotiates with par- 
liamentary leaders at Newport, 
248-50; transferred to Hurst 
Castle, 259 ; conveyed to Wind- 
sor, 261 ; trial, 266-70 ; execu- 
tion and burial, 270-2 ; Crom- 
well's judgment of the execu- 
tion, 272 ; Fox and Carlyle on 
the execution, 272-3 ; popular 
sentiment aroused by the execu- 
tion, 351 

Pe7-sonal Characteristics. — Ap- 
pearance, 248-9 ; artistic taste, 12, 
26 ; blindness to events, 204-5 ! 



INDEX 



477 



determination, 188-201, 220, 234; 
devotion to the queen, 27, 206 ; to 
the Church, 201-2 
General Traits, 23, 24, 25-7, 69, 
133, 188, 201, 202, 220, 270 

Charles II — Sent to France, 207; 
Scottish negotiations with (1650), 
301 ; advance from Stirling to 
Worcester, 314; flight, 317; con- 
nives at plot to assassinate Crom- 
well, 382 ; royalist's interview 
with, at Cologne, 385 ; restora- 
tion of, 468 

Chatham, estimate of Cromwell, 

432 

Chillingworth, William, 38, 1 10, 
191 

Church, national (see also Angli- 
can Church) — Cromwell's im- 
portance in history of, 412 ; estab- 
lishment and endowment of, 
provided by instrument of gov- 
ernment, 362; government of, de- 
bated, 152-4; iconoclasm in, 91 ; 
Presbyterian system introduced 
into, 155-6; separation of, from 
State advocated by Milton, 366 

Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of, 
banishment ofStrafford advocated 
by, 83 ; Charles's overtures to, 
102 ; return of, from exile, 468 ; 
character of, 91 ; cited — on Crom- 
well's characteristics, 2, 88; on 
Essex, 173; on Independents 
and Presbyterians, 212 ; on bur- 
ial of Charles I, 271 ; on Drog- 
heda massacre, 291 ; on Crom- 
well's deliberation regarding 
kingship, 420 

Claypole, John, opposes bill regard- 
ing major-generals, 406; mar- 
riage of, to Elizabeth Cromwell. 
428 

Clonmel, siege of, 293 

Coke, Sir Edward, 12, 16, 23, 66, 
362 

Colchester, siege of, iii, 242 

Coleman's defense of Erastianism, 

'54 

Cologne, royalist interview with 

Charles II at, 385 
Committee of both kingdoms, 169, 

176,237 
Commonwealth, proclamation of, 

278 



Cony, case of, 387 ; popular sym- 
pathy with, 394 

Cotton, Sir Robert, 21, 67 

Council of State, establishment; of, 
278 ; Cromwell's report to, on 
Ireland and Scotland, 284-5; 
promptitude and eificiency of, 
314,321-3 

Court of High Commission, illegali- 
ties of, 61 ; abolition of, 85 

Crawford, Lawrence, rebuked by 
Cromwell, 121 

Cromwell — 

Bridget (daughter of Oliver), mar- 
ried to Ireton, 200; to Fleetwood, 
428 ; Elizabeth (daughter of Oli- 
ver), married to Claypole, 428 ; 
death of, 462; Elizabeth (wife of 
Oliver), 13-14; Frances (daugh- 
ter of Oliver), 429 ; Henry, Sir 
(grandfather of Oliver), 9-10; 
Henry (son ofOliver), Cromwell's 
instructions to, in Ireland, 297; 
representative of Ireland in Little 
Parliament, 344; correspondence 
with Thurloe, 379, 393-4, 405 ; fi- 
nancial straits of, in Ireland, 456; 
suspicious of combination, 457; 
comment on Cromwell's position 
in London, 419 ; opinion on the 
kingship, 421 ; estimate of the 
situation in 1658, 457-8; ability 
of, 374, 428 ; Henry, incident of 
the scarlet cloak, 406 ; Mary 
(daughter of Oliver), married to 
Fauconberg, 429 ; intercedes for 
Hewitt, 455; Oliver — Chrono- 
logical Sequence of Career. — De- 
scent and family, 9-10; early 
life, lO-il, 12-13; niarriage, 13; 
religious gloom, 14- 1 5 ; member 
for Huntingdon, 16; first speech 
in Parliament, 17; removal to S. 
Ives, 17; to Ely, 18; dispute 
over Huntingdon charter, 18; 
death of eldest son (1639), 19; 
member for Cambridge in Short 
Parliament, 66 ; in Long Par- 
liament, 74; service on parlia- 
mentary committees, 88 ; Edge- 
hill, 119-20; conversation with 
Hampden on choice of officers, 
1 20-1 ; obstruction in Ely Ca- 
thedral, 123-4; Marston Moor, 
136-43 ; proposes abolition of 



478 



INDEX 



episcopacy, 145 ; attacks Lord 
Manchester, 164-6; appointed 
lieutenant-general under Fairfax, 
174; Naseby, 176-183; thanked 
and rewarded by parliament, 192 ; 
negotiates with the army for dis- 
bandment, 213, 223; threatens 
parliament with military force, 
217-18; army debates, 224-32; 
operations in South Wales, 242 ; 
Preston, 244-5 5 Charles's trial, 
266-70; Irish campaign, 286-99; 
thanked and rewarded by parlia- 
ment, 301; Dunbar, 304-9; ill- 
ness, 310; advance to Perth, 313 ; 
to Worcester, 314-15; battle of 
Worcester, 315-77; thanked and 
rewarded by parliament, 319; 
dissolution of Rump Parliament, 
334-7; made Lord Protector 
(1653), 358; legislative activity, 
364-71 ; compulsion of first par- 
liament of Protectorate, 376-7; 
plot to assassinate, 385 ; purge 
of parliament (1656), 399; plots 
to assassinate, 406-8; refuses 
kingship, 422 ; again installed as 
Lord Protector (1657), 423-4; 
dissolves second parliament 
(1658), 453 ; illness and death, 
462-3 ; remains desecrated, 464-5 
Personal Characteristics, etc. — 
Affection, 426-8, 462 ; appear- 
ance and manner, 74-6, 223 ; 
Bible, attitude toward, 50-2 ; 
broadmindedness, 6, 228; cau- 
tion, 77, 107, 210, 258, 319, 
439, 466 ; compassion and ten- 
derness, 77, 245, 347, 426-8; 
constructive statesmanship, de- 
ficiency of, 380, 456; courage 
and fortitude, 6, 18, 77, 210, 304- 
305 ; education, views on, 12-13 5 
furtherance of, 366, 429 ; energy, 
6, 78, 88, 174, 310, 319, 448; 
faith, 18, 50-2, 77, 303, 305, 
355, 462-3 ; finance, incapacity 
for, 399 ; force, distrust of, 223, 
469 ; form and dogma, indiffer- 
ence to, 228, 324, 358, 367; 
geniality, 429-30 ; honor, 6 ; hope- 
fulness, 176, 305, 319, 440; im- 
petuosity and passionateness, 18, 
76-7, 210, 336, 432; jesting, 
love of, 77, 209 ; legal apprehen- 



sion, incapacity ot, 399 ; military 
excellence, 465, et passim ; mod- 
eration, 221, 320, 384; moral 
unity, 319; music, love of, 429; 
mysticism, 303 ; national senti- 
ment, 255, 303; order and gov- 
ernment, instinct for, 365, 388, 
417, 469; persistency and pa- 
tience, 6, 107, 174, 266, 440, 461, 
466 ; popularity with his troops, 
209; public opinion, attitude to- 
ward, 468 ; reserve, 77, 253 ; sa- 
gacity, 107, 219, 432; lack of 
sagacity, 346 ; speech, style, and 
manner of, 374; sport, love of, 
429; toleration, 122, 162, 186, 
189, 198, 347; unity, desire for, 
224, 228 ; Oliver, Sir (uncle of 
Oliver), 10; Richard, Sir (great- 
grandfather of Oliver), 9 ; Richard 
(son of Oliver), Cromwell's ad- 
monition to, 51; character and 
tastes of, 428, 468; Richard 
(uncle of Oliver), 17; Robert 
(father of Oliver), 10, 15 ; Thomas, 
9.470 
Culpeper, 102 



" De paucitate credendorum," 150 

De Retz, cited, 219, 339, 415 

Deane, Admiral, 321-3 

Declaration of Right, 471 

Denmark, Anne of, 25 ; Cromwell's 
treaty with, 435 

Derby House Committee, 163, 246 

Desborough, John, republican form 
of government advocated by, 327; 
anxiety of, regarding elections, 
394; introduces bill regarding 
major-generals, 406 ; opposes 
Cromwell's acceptance of king- 
ship, 421 

D'Ewes, Henrietta Maria described 
by, 30-31 

Diggers, 281-2, 325 

Dort, Synod of, li, 52, 56 

Drogheda massacre, 288-291 

Dunbar, Cromwell's position at, 
304-6; battle of, 307-9; Crom- 
well's estimate of, 52, 311-12 

Dunes, battle of the, 460 

Dunkirk, treaty for cession of, 444 ; 
capture of, and cession to Eng- 
land, 459-60 



INDEX 



479 



Durham, college at, founded by 
Cromwell, 429 

Edgehill, 119-20, 136 

Education, Cromwell's views on, 
12-13; his furtherance of, 366, 
429 

Ejectors and triers, 368 

Elector Palatine, 103, 189 

Eliot, Sir John, Cromwell contrasted 
with, 12 ; resolutions of, put in 
defiance of Charles, 17; imprison- 
ment and death of, 66, 286 

Elizabeth, Queen, Henry Cromwell 
knighted by, 9 ; policy of, 24, 34, 
447; Ireland under, 94; duplicity 
of, 203 

Ely, Cromwell's removal to, 18 ; 
his defense of, 1 77-8 ; his obstruc- 
tion in the cathedral, 123-4 

Engagers, 245, 300 

Episcopacy. See Anglican Church 

Erastianism, 153-4 

Essex, Earl of, advocates Straf- 
ford's execution, 83 ; unsuccessful 
against Oxford, 134; successful 
at Gloucester, 135 ; escapes from 
Plymouth, 163; Scotch commis- 
sioners' debate with, on Crom- 
well's conduct, 166 ; resignation 
of, 173; characteristics of, 131 ; 
contemporary estimate of, 107-8 

Exeter, capture of, by Fairfax, 191 

Exeter, Lord, inquiry of, on horse- 
racing, 391 

Faction, 90 

Fairfax, Sir Thomas, at Marston 
Moor, 137, 140-41 ; appointed 
parliamentarian commander-in- 
chief, 170, 197; petitions for 
Cromwell's appointment as lieu- 
tenant-general, 174; appreciation 
of Cromwell, 178; at Naseby, 
178-80, 182-3; Bristol capitulates 
to, :88; successes of, in Devon, 
191; at Colchester, ill, 246; 
treatment of mutineers, 282 ; 
withdraws from prominent posi- 
tion, 301-2 ; energy and ability 
of, 134, 180, 242 ; scrupulousness 
of, 302 ; otherwise mentioned, 
135,217,234,264,271,315 

Falkland, Lord, Cromwell con- 
trasted with, 12; abstains from 



voting on Strafford's attainder, 
83 ; court party supported by, 
91-2; Charles's overtures to, 102; 
death of, 130 ; estimate of, 130 

Fauconberg, Lord, marriage of, to 
Lady Mary Cromwell, 429 ; sent 
by Cromwell to Calais, 459-60 

Fifth Monarchy men, 280, 348, 408 

Fleet — 

Cromwell supported by, 383; 
mutiny in, 237; organization of, 
by Council of State, 321 ; parlia- 
mentarians supported by, no; 
West Indies expedition, 436-8 

Fleetwood, Charles, advanced views 
of, 198 ; negotiates with the army 
for disbandment, 213; battle of 
Worcester, 315-16; opposes 
Cromwell's acceptance of king- 
ship, 421 ; married to Bridget 
Cromwell, 428 ; tries to dissuade 
Cromwell from dissolving parlia- 
ment, 453 ; otherwise mentioned, 
298, 304, 321, 456 

Fox, Charles, on execution of 
Charles I, 272 

Fox, George, Nayler a disciple of, 
402-3 ; Cromwell's regard for, 410 

France — 

Commonwealth recognized by, 
321 ; convention of 1793 compared 
with the Rump's proposed con- 
stitution, 333 ; Cromwell's rela- 
tions with, 439-41 ; Fronde, the, 
contrasted with the civil war, 
209; Protestantism in, 157 

Gainsborough, cavalry victory at, 

124-6 
Gardiner, S. R., cited, 3, 179, 436 
Gerard, Cromwell's assassination 

plotted by, 382 
Glamorgan treaty, 206 
Gloucester, siege of, 135 
Gloucester, Duke of, 327, 459 
Godwin, W., estimate of Cromwell, 2 
Goffe, Col., 227, 230, 395 
Goring, Lord, 137, 140-1, 177 
Gowran, surrender of, 292-3 
Grand Remonstrance, the (1641), 
demands of, loo-l, 145-6; In- 
strument of Government con- 
trasted with, 362 
Grantham, cavalry skirmish near, 
124 



48o 



INDEX 



Guizot, cited, 340, 441, 465 
Gustavus Adolphus, influence of, 

on military tactics, 1 15 
Gustavus Vasa, position of, com- 
pared with Cromwell's, 372-3 

Hallam on Long Parliament, 85-6 

Hamilton, James, Duke of, 238, 
241-5 

Hammond, Col., Cromwell's letters 
to, 254-5 

Hampden, John, claims of, 23 ; 
ship-money case decided against, 
62-3 ; Strafford's attainder op- 
posed by, 83 ; watches Charles 
in Scotland, 92 ; impeached by 
Charles, 103 ; proposes parlia- 
mentary control of militia, 105 ; 
Cromwell's advice to, about offi- 
cers, I20-I ; death of, 131 ; Crom- 
well contrasted with, 12; other- 
wise mentioned, 16, 19, 61, 122, 
362 

Harrison, Major, Charles conveyed 
to Windsor by, 260- 1 ; march on 
Worcester, 315; at dismissal 01 
Long Parliament, 334-6; mem- 
ber of Little Parliament, 344; 
convention inspired by, 345 ; im- 
prisonment of, 385, 422 ; sus- 
pected of designs on Cromwell, 
408 ; extreme views of, 329, 343 ; 
Cromwell's regard for, 408 ; other- 
wise mentioned, 252, 271 

Haselrig, Sir Arthur, impeached by 
Charles, 103 ; in first parliament 
of Protectorate, 373; withstands 
Cromwell's compulsion of parlia- 
ment, 377; influence of, feared 
by Whalley, 394 

Heads of the Proposals of the Army, 
225, 359 

Healing Question, the, 397 

Henderson, Alexander, 149-50 

Henrietta Maria, Queen, charac- 
teristics and influence of, 25, 
29-31 ; correspondence of, with 
Charles, 202-3, 205-6 

Henry of Navarre, 25, 30, 203 

Herbert, George, Laud's influence 
on, 38 

Herbert, Lady, on Naseby field, 
184-5 

Hewitt, Dr., case of, 455 

Hinchinbrook, 9, 15 



Hitch, Mr., Cromwell's dispute 
with, 123-4 

Hobbes, 54, 73, 133 

Holland — 

Arminianism in, 52-3; Catholic 
influence in, 43 ; Cromwell's 
treaty with, 435 ; hostility be- 
tween English parliament and, 
280, 322-3, 442 ; Wagstafife's 
flight to, 384 ; war with, 323 

Holies, Denzil, Speaker detained 
by, 17; impeached by Charles, 
103 ; hostility of, to Cromwell, 
166-7; Presbyterians led by, 247 

Holmby, Charles I at, 208 ; his re- 
moval from, 214-15 

Hopton, Ralph, Lord, no, 134, 191 

Horncastle fight, 126-7 

Howe, John, devotional feats of, 

431 

Hull, Charles I refused entry of, 
106; Fairfax's withdrawal to, 
134 ; siege of, raised by New- 
castle, 136 

Humble Petition and Advice, na- 
ture of, 362,424-5; introduction 
of, 416 

Huntingdon, Cromwell member for, 
16; charter dispute, 18 

Hurst Castle, 259 

Hyde. See Clarendon 

Independents (see also Puritan- 
ism) — 

Cromwell supported by, 162; in- 
tolerance of, 414; Irish policy of, 
294 ; Long Parliament reinforced 
by, 198; numerical inferiority of, 
279; Presbyterians opposed by, 
153, 161-2, 198, 201, 204, 366; 
contrasted with, 212 

Instruments of Government — 
Adoption of, 358 ; American con- 
stitution compared with, 363 ; 
army, control and numbers of, 
regulated by, 361-2, 378-9; 
Cromwell's contravention of, 390; 
fundamentals of, 363, 377-8; 
provisions of, 360-2, 424; re- 
modeling of, 416; toleration af- 
firmed by, 362, 367 

Inverkeithing, 313 

Ireland — 

Catholicism in, 95, 283-4, 405 ; 
Charles I's proposed abandon- 



INDEX 



ment of, 202 ; CromweH's settle- 
ment of, 287, 297-9, 317; danger 
to England from, 207 ; Henry 
Cromwell Lord Deputy of, 428 ; 
incorporation of, with England 
originated by Long Parliament, 
344, 365; land settlement scheme 
for, 365; O'Neill's importance in, 
283 ; Ormonde's policy in, 283-4 ; 
rebellion of 1641, causes of, 94-6 ; 
scope of, 96-8; representation of, 
in English parliament, 344 ; par- 
liamentary influence of, 405 ; 
Rinuccini's aims in, 2S3 ; Straf 
ford's rule and policy in, 20, 32-3, 
61, 95; his unpopularity in, 81, 

95 
Ireton, Henry, at Naseby, 180-1,183, 

199; at Marston, Gainsborough, 
and Edgehill, 199; negotiates with 
the army for disbandment, 213; 
Heads of the Proposals of the 
Army framed by, 225 ; debates 
measures with extremists in the 
army, 225-231 ; remonstrance of 
the army drawn up by, 251 ; dese- 
cration of remains of, 464; ad- 
vanced views of, 198 ; character 
and ability of, 199-200; otherwise 
mentioned. III, 198, 271, 321 

Irish — camp - followers slain at 
Naseby, 184, 286; defeat of, un- 
der Montrose, 187; English con- 
trasted with, 219; transportations 
of, to Jamaica, 297 

Ironside, origin of nickname, 139 

Jamaica, Irish transportation to, 

297; seizure of, 43S, 447 
Jefferson, Cromwell contrasted with, 

471 

Jesuits, influence of, 42 ; proposed 

rigorous legislation against, 412 
Jews, position of, under Cromwell, 

413 
Johnson, Dr., on Laud's execution, 

'55 
Joyce, Cornet, 214-15 
Juxon, bishop of London, 57, 83 

Killing no Murder, 406 
Kirk sessions, powers of, 57 
Knox, John, 55 

Lambert, John, at Dunbar, 307-8 ; 
in Scotland, 312-13; march on 
31 



Worcester, 315 ; member of Little 
Parhament, 344; Instrument of 
Government prepared by, 357; 
resents parliamentary attack on 
major-generals, 405; opposes 
Cromwell's acceptance of king- 
ship, 418, 42 [; dismissed by 
Cromwell, 422 ; opposes aggres- 
sion in West Indies, 436; military 
talent and ability of, 263, 315, 
374; extreme views of, 329; 
otherwise mentioned, 242, 336, 

344. 430> 457 

Langdale, Sir Marmaduke, 180-2, 
242-4 

Lansdown, royalist victory at, 134 

Laud, archbishop of Canterbury, 
Sidney Sussex College denounced 
by, 1 1 ; Scotch policy of, 20, 64 ; 
Arminianism approved by, 52 ; 
chief justice censured by, 58; 
flight of, from Lambeth, 69 ; 
Strafford's case estimated by, 
84 ; Prynne victimized by, 286 ; 
execution of, 155, 191 ; charac- 
teristics of, 37-9; estimate of. 
by historians, 35-6; Bramhall 
compared with, by Cromwell, 90 

Lecturers, Cromwell's plea for, 18 

Leicester, storming of, by Charles I, 
176 

Leighton, Alexander, 61-2, 90 

Lenthall, William, Speaker of the 
House of Commons, withstands 
Charles's violation of parliamen- 
tary privilege, 103-4; joins the 
army, 217; Cromwell's confer- 
ences with, 263 ; Cromwell ac- 
companied by, on entering I>on- 
don, 319; monarchy advocated 
by, 326-7 ; protests against dis- 
solution of the Rump Parliament, 
337; his view of Cromwell's 
Chancery ordinance, 365 

Leslie, David, Cromwell supported 
by, at Marston Moor, 137-9, 141, 
143; Montrose defeated by, 187; 
Cromwell opposed by, in Edin- 
burgh, 304; at Dunbar, 304-7; 
at Stirling, 312 

Levelers, 225, 230, 231, 281-2, 325 

Leven, Lord, 136 

Lilburne, John, persecution of,6i-2; 
Agreement of the People drawn 
up by (1648;, 225; trial and 



482 



INDEX 



acquittal of, 350; characteristics 
of, 280 

Little Parliament, summoning of, 
343-4; Scotland and Ireland 
represented in, 344; Cromwell's 
inaugural address to, 345-7; fidel- 
ity of, to Cromwell, 348 ; legisla- 
tive attempts of, 349-50; dissolu- 
tion of, 350-1 

Lockhart, Sir William, 431, 459-61 

London, City of — 

Army, hostility to, 223 ; disband- 
nient of, urged, 212; Charles I, 
welcomed by, 100; his cause fa- 
vored by (1648), 246; Cromwell 
thanked by, for Irish victories, 
301; acclaimedby, after Worcester, 
319; his vigilance over, 386; fer- 
ment of, in 1644, 147; parliamen- 
tarians supported by, 109; peace 
desired by, 211; petitions pre- 
sented by, 452; Presbyterianism 
strong in, 279, 369; Puritanism 
strong in, 68; riots in (1647), 
216-7; (1648), 238 

Long Parliament — 

Calling of, 70 ; Charles's attack on 
five members of, 103-5 ; compo- 
sition of, 71-3 ; Cromwell's rela- 
tions numerous in, 74; Holland, 
attitude toward, 280, 322-3, 442 ; 
military force, threatened with, 
216-18; numbers of, in divisions, 
in early days, 197; after Pride's 
Purge, 277; Pride's Purge, 259- 
260, 329 

Lords, House of — 

Abolition of, 277-8; bishops' ex- 
clusion from, proposed, 89, 93, 
145; Charles I, cause of, sup- 
ported by, 92, 247; ordinance for 
impeachment of, rejected by, 262 ; 
Commons supported by (1640), 
73 ; in disagreement with, 92, 
247, 262 ; insignificance of, in 
1647, 197 ; rioters' attack on, 217 ; 
royalism of, 92, 247, 262 ; Straf- 
ford, attitude toward, 79-80 

Ludlow, Edmund, comment on the 
Drogheda massacre, 290-1 ; com- 
plaints to Cromwell, 324 ; disso- 
lution of Rump Parliament de- 
scribed by, 334-6 ; Cromwell's 
overtures to, 457; otherwise 
mentioned, 198, 266, 321 



Lynn, Elizabeth (wife of Robert 
Cromwell), 10 



Magna Charta, Cromwell's mock at, 
387 

Major-Generals, scope of work of, 
388-9 ; failure of, 401 ; parlia- 
mentary decision against, 404-5 

Manchester, Earl of, attacked by 
Cromwell, 164-6; resignation of, 
173; temperament of, 131, 163; 
otherwise mentioned, 15, 121, 

135. 

Manning, Cromwell informed of 
royalist doings by, 385-6 

Mardyke, 444 

Marston Moor, battle of, 136-143 ; 
moral effect of victory, 154-5 ; 
compared with Bunker Hill, 168; 
with Naseby, 182-3 ; royalist 
rendezvous near site of, 383 

Mary of Guise, 25 

Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, 25, 85 

Mary Tudor, Queen of England, 42 

Mayor, Richard, extract from Crom- 
well's letter to, 51 

Mazarm, Richelieu succeeded by, 
130; Scottish intrigues with, 203; 
correspondence with Cromwell 
regarding toleration for Catho- 
lics, 203, 412 ; at Dunkirk, 459 ; 
idea of, in ceding Dunkirk, 460; 
character and policy of, 439-43 

Mediterranean, English fleet in, •;2I, 

438 

Militia Bill (1641), loi 

Milton, John — 

Areopagitica published by, 159; 
Church and State, separation of, 
advocated by, 366 ; Cromwell 
contrasted with, 12; advised by, 
356-7 ; national sentiment of, 
255 ; secretaryship of the Coun- 
cil of State held by, 356, 390 ; 
toleration advocated by, 45, 159- 
161 ; cited — on state of London 
in 1644, 147; on national free- 
dom, 221 ; on toil of construc- 
tive policy, 318; on popular 
sentiment for Charles I, 351 ; 
otherwise mentioned, 56, 73> -73' 

333. 414. 472 
Mommsen, Sulla compared to Crom- 
well by, 364 



INDEX 



48: 



Monk, General George, 321, 323, 

344. 431 ^ ^ 

Montrose, Marquis of, 146, 187, 

205 
Mozley, J. B., estimate of Crom- 
well, 253 

Napoleon, numbers under, 136 

Naseby, battle of, 176-86; Irish 
camp-followers slain after, 184, 
286; moral effects of victory, 222 

Navarre, Henry of, 25, 30, 203 

Navigation Act (1651), 322, 447-8 

Navy. See Fleet 

Nayler, James, case of, 403-4 

Newark, royalist stronghold at, 124 

Newburn, 69 

Newbury, 130, 135, 164 

Newcastle, royahst port at, 134; 
nineteen propositions of, 201 

Newcastle, Earl of, at Gainsbor- 
ough, 125 ; besieged in York, 
136; at Marston Moor, 137-8, 
141 ; character of, 133 

New England, I'uritan exodus to, 39 

Newman, on Eaud, 36 

New Model. See under Army 

Newport treaty, terms of, 248-50; 
Cromwell's view of, 258 

O'Byrnes, treatment of, 96 

Okey, John, social position of, 1 71 ; 
at Naseby, 181; suspected 01 
designs on Cromwell, 408 

O'Neil, Sir Phelim, 98 

O'Neill, Owen Roe, 283 

Ormonde, Earl of, Charles's instruc- 
tions to, 250-1 ; character and 
policy of, 283-4 

Other House, the, 480-1 

Overton, Richard, imprisonment of, 
386 

Owen, Dr. John, ecclesiastical 
scheme of, adopted by Crom- 
well, 368 

Oxenstierna, Whitelocke's inter- 
view with, concerning Cromwell, 

372 
Oxford — 

Charles I's escape from, 195 ; 
Essex unsuccessful at, 134; sur- 
render of, 196; treaty of (1643), 
200 ; university men in Long 
Parliament, 72 



Packe, Sir Christopher, proposals 
of, 415-16 

Paris, treaty of, 443 

Parliament — 

Long, Sliort, etc. See those titles; 
purges of (1647), 216; Pride's, 
259-60, 329; (1654), 332, 376-7; 
(1656), 329, 399 

Peers. See Lords 

Pembroke Castle, Cromwell's cap- 
ture of, 242 

Penruddock's rising, 384 

Perth, Cromwell's advance to, 313 

Peters, Hugh, 191, 461 

Petition of Right, 16 

Philip IV of Spain, 439 

Philiphaugh, 187 

Piedmontese, massacre of, 298, 441 

Portugal, Cromwell's treaty with, 

435 

Prelacy. See Anglican Church — 
Episcopacy 

Press, censorship of, under parlia- 
mentarians, 282 ; under Protec- 
torate. 390 

Presbyterianism — 

Charles I's dislike of, 201; Eng- 
land, introduced into, 155-6 
kirk sessions, powers of, 57 
London, strong in, 279, 369 
Montrose's dislike of, 146-7 
party aspect of, 161, 324 

Presbyterians — 

Exasperation of (1649), 279; 
Fairfax's position a satisfaction 
to, 302 ; Independents opposed 
to, 153-4, 161, 198, 201, 204,366; 
contrasted with, 212; toleration 
opposed by, 158, 247-8, 300, 369 

Preston, battles of, 244-5 

Pride, Col., social position of, 171 ; 
Pride's Purge, 259-60, 329 ; peti- 
tion of, against Cromwell's ac- 
ceptance of kingship, 422 

Propagation of religion, Cromwell's 
eagerness for, 366-7, 429, 450 

Protesters, 312 

Prynne, William, 61-2, 286 

Public opinion, Cromwell's atti- 
tude toward, 468 

Punishments, barbarity of, 61-2, 96 

Purges of Parliament. See under 
Parliament 

Puritanism (see also Anabaptism 
and Independents) — 



484 



INDEX 



Aims of, 47-8; austerity of, un- 
popular 238, 390 ; exodus of Puri- 
tans to New Englarifl, 39; intol- 
erance and violence of, 146, 159, 
162, 169, 403 ; Irish troubles ag- 
gravated by, 95-6 ; legislative in- 
capacity of, 349 ; national cove- 

. nant the center of, 65 ; Presbyte- 
rianism contrasted with, 129 ; 
Protestant left wing, 44; rise of, 
55-6; strength of, 176; vague- 
ness in ideas of, 209 

Pym, John, claims of, 23 ; leader of 
parliamentary party, 67, 88, 92 ; 
Strafford impeached by, 79 ; 
Strafford's attainder opposed by, 
83; bill for excluding bishops 
from parliament supported by, 
93; Charles's overtures to, 102; 
Charles's impeachment of, 103 ; 
Scottish treaty concluded by, 
127-9; death of, 131 ; character- 
istics and ability of, 39-41, 67, 
105-6 ; otherwise mentioned, 16, 
63, 86, 105, 122, 362 



Quakers, persecutions of, under the 
Protectorate, 409-u 



Rainborough, Thomas, arguments 

with, 227, 230-1 
Ranke, cited, 311, 321, 343, 442 
Rationalism, toleration sprung from, 

414, 471 
Remonstrants, 312 
Resolutioners, 312 
Retz, de, cited, 219, 339, 415 
Rich, Robert, married to Lady 

Frances Cromwell, 429 ; death of, 

462 
Richelieu, Strafford compared with, 

34 ; Scotland promised aid by, 65 ; 

Mazarin the successor of, 130 ; 

treaty of Westphalia due to, 439 
Rinuccini, papal nuncio in Ireland, 

283-4 
Rogers, John, Cromwell's inter- 
view with, 411 
" Root-and-Branch " policy, 63, 89- 

90, 93 
Round way Down, 134 
Rump Parliament, unpopularity of, 

328 , constitutional plans of, 330 ; 



dissolution of, 334-7; estimate 
of transaction, 337-41 
Rupert, Prince, in York and after, 
136, 163 ; at Marston Moor, 137- 
140, 143; at Xaseby, iSo, 1S3; 
Charles's letter to, 188-9; es- 
cape of, from Bristol, 188-9; 
naval o]3erations of, 280 ; tem- 
perament and ability of, 107, 127 

Saint Domingo, failure of expedi- 
tion to, 438 
St. Ives, Cromwell's removal to, 17 
St. John, Oliver, 20, 23, 82, 326-7, 

344 

Salisbury, royalist rising at, 384 

Scotland — 

Charles I's religious policy in, 
64-5; visit to, 87; Charles IPs 
arrival in, 301 ; Cromwell's appeal 
to the General Assembly, 302-3 ; 
England's ignorance of affairs in, 
65 ; parliamentary support of, 
67 ; danger to England appre- 
hended from, 200 ; hostility of, 
to England (1649-50), 282-3, 
300-1 ; incorporation of, with 
England originated by Long 
Parliament, 344, 365; representa- 
tion of, in English parliament, 
344 ; influenceof representatives, 
405; kirk sessions, powers of, 
57; Knox's influence in, 55; 
Mazarin's dealings with, 203; 
National Covenant, inauguration 
of, 64-5 ; Pym's treaty with, 127-9, 
148; Richelieu's dealings with, 
65 ; Shorter Catechism's effect 
on, 151 ; Strafford's unpopular- 
ity in, 81 

Scots — 

Advance of, to Durham, 69 ; 
over the border (1644), 136; 
sufferings in north of England 
under, 169; Charles I, enthu- 
siasm for, 187; his surrender to, 
196 ; his abandonment by, 207-8 ; 
his secret treaty with, 236 ; his 
cause favored by, 241 ; Charles 
II, negotiations with, in Hol- 
land, 301 ; march south with, 
314; Committee of Both King- 
doms, represented on, 237 ; 
Cromwell's unpopularity with 
Scotch commissioners, 166-7, 



INDEX 



485 



campaign of 1650, 300-15 ; Eng- 
lish contrasted with, 219; Ire- 
land, in, 99 

Sealed Knot, the, 382-3 

Seekers, 2!0 

Selby, 136 

Selden, John, 16, 23, 67, 72, 83, 
148 

Self-denying Ordinance, 174-5, 197; 
second, 174 

Sexby, Crom'Aell's assassination 
plotted by, 407 

Ship-money, opposition to, 62, 68 ; 
abolition of, 85 

Short Parliament, 56-8 

Sidney, Algernon, 198, 267 

Sindercombe, Miles, Cromwell's as- 
sassination plotted by, 407 

Skippon, Philip, 179, 180-I, 213 

Slingsby, Sir Henry, case of, 455 

Solemn League and Covenant, 128- 
129, 148 

Southworth, John, fate of, 413 

Spain — 

Commonwealth recognized by, 
321 ; Cromwell's assurances to, 
438 ; alleged negotiations with, 
446; hostility of, to England 
(1656'), 438; war with, 442 

Star Chamber, illegalities of, 61 ; 
abolition of, 85 

Steward, Elizabeth, wife of Robert 
Cromwell, 10 

Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, Earl 
of, popular party supported by, 
16; rule and policy of, in Ire- 
land, 20, 32-3, 61, 95 ; court 
partly supported by, 31; recall 
of, from Ireland, 70 ; impeach- 
ment and death of, 77-84 ; char- 
acter and aims of, 31-5; Crom- 
well compared with, 294-5, 29S, 
359 ; otherwise mentioned, 337, 

393 

Stratton, 134 

Strode, Charles's impeachment of, 
103 

Sweden — 

Cromwell's treaty with, 435 ; 
quarrels of, 445 ; Queen Chris- 
tina of, on Cromwell, 372-3 

Swift, cited, 423, 429 

Tadcaster, 134 

Taylor, Jeremy, 38, 412 



Thirty Years' War, religious ele- 
ment in, 43-4; numbers of troops 
engaged in, 136 

" Thorough," policy of, 63 

Thurloe, John, correspondence of, 
with Henry Cromwell, 379, 393- 
394' 405 ; vigilance of, 385, 397 ; 
hostility of, to Quakers, 410; 
Cromwell's relations with, 43 1 ; 
financial straits of, 455, 461 ; 
cited, 384, 389, 427-8, 455 ; other- 
wise mentioned, 386, 432-3, 446 

Toleration — 

Catholicism excluded from, 160, 
362, 367, 412; Cromwell's ad- 
herence to, 122, 159, 186, 189, 
198, 347; Instrument of Govern- 
ment's adoption of, 362, 367; 
Milton's view of, 45, 159-61 ; 
parliamentary attitude toward, 
158, 402 ; prelacy excluded from, 
362, 369; Presbyterian attitude 
toward, 158, 247-8, 300, 369 

Toleration Act, 471 

Triers and ejectors, 368 

Turenne, Cromwell's veterans 
praised by, 444 ; commanding at 
Dunkirk, 459 



Ulster rebellion, alleged connec- 
tion of, with Drogheda massacre, 
291 

Usher, archbishop of Armagh, 83, 
90 

Uxbridge, treaty of (1644-5"), 200 



Vane, Sir Henry, abolition of 
episcopacy proposed by, 145 ; 
Charles's trial disapproved by, 
267; maritime policy of, 321, 
323 ; constitutional scheme of, 
33^~3'i withstands Cromwell at 
dissolution of Rump Parliament, 
335 ; Scottish policy of, 344 ; 
Healing Question published by, 
397 ; imprisonment of, 397 ; 
Cromwell's overtures to, 457; 
energy and capacity of, 338 ; 
otherwise mentioned, 72, 394 

Vaudois, case of the, 298, 441-2 

Venner, plot of, 408 

Vowel, Cromwell's assassination 
plotted by, 382 



486 



INDEX 



Wales, Cromwell's operations in, 
242 

Walker, Clement, on Irish policy 
of Independents, 294 

Waller, Sir William, letter of, to 
Hopton, 1 10 ; defeat of, 134 ; res- 
ignation of, 173; Cromwell de- 
scribed by, 164 

Walton's polyglot Bible, Cromwell's 
interest in, 429 

Ward, Dr. Saimiel, Cromwell under, 
at Cambridge, II 

Washington, George, Cromwell 
compared with, 167-8, 465 

Weingarten, cited, 351, 412 

Wentvvorth, Sir Peter, Cromwell 
rebuked by, at dissolution of 
Kump Parliament, 335; suit of, 
against tax-collector, 387 

Wentworth, Sir Thomas. See 
Sirafford 

West Indies, English aggression in, 
436-8, 442 

Westminster, treaty of, 443 

Westminster Assembly, the, 144- 

Westphalia, treaty of, 439 

Wexford, sack of, 292 

Whalley, Major, at Gainsborough, 
126; at Naseby, 181 ; Cromwell's 
letter to, regarding Charles I, 
233 ; republican form of govern- 
ment advocated by, 327; horse- 
racing permitted by, 391 ; anxiety 
of, on election prospects, 394; 



admission of Jews advocated by, 

\\ hitelocke, Bulstrode, hostilities 
against Cromwell deprecated by, 
167; monarchy advocated by, 
326-7 ; Cromwell's conversation 
with, on inefficiency of parlia- 
ment, 327-8 ; conversation on 
Cromwell at Swedish court, 372- 
373; rigorous legislation against 
Jesuits opposed by, 412; irregu- 
lar courts disapproval by, 455.; 
cited, on Laud, 36 ; on Crom- 
well's geniality, 432 

Wildman, Major John, 226, 385 

Wilkins, Bishop, on Cromwell's 
view of episcopacy, 368 

William III, Cromwell compared 
with, 465 

Williams, Bishop, 83-4 

Williams, Richard (afterward Rich- 
ard Cromwell), 9 

Williams, Roger, 413 

Winceby, Cromwell's success at, 
126-7, 135-6 

Winchester, fall of, 190 

Windsor prayer-meetings, 239-40 

Winstanley, Gerrard, cited, 282 

Winwick, 244 

Worcester, Cromwell's march to, 
314-15; battle of, 315-17 

Wright, Peter, fate of, 412-13 

York, Duke of, 459 



^W\. 



